by Mary Bowers
“You didn’t know?” he asked. “You always seem to know everything. When the M.E. did the autopsy, he found an inoperable tumor on Fred’s brain.”
“Did he know?” I asked.
“Yes. It had been diagnosed about a month ago. He was getting his affairs in order.”
I thought about it. “Did his friends know about the tumor?”
“Nobody seemed to. Anyway, nobody admits it. The Footes might have known, though, and if he swore them to secrecy, they’re the kind who’d honor their promise.”
“But they were so close. In fact, they went with Fred to the emergency room in the ambulance.”
“There was a good reason for that. I told you about the medical power of attorney. And vice versa. I checked.”
“You would.”
He Scout-saluted. “Just doin’ my job, ma’am.”
They took another step toward the door.
“Getting friendly with the handyman, by the way?”
“He did some work out at Orphans of the Storm. You know that. Why?”
“I saw you talking to him. Friendly conversation?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“No reason.” Shrug.
“I already told you, he never got to the point. Why?”
“There’s lots of talk going around.”
“About Jason and Terri having an affair?”
He looked startled. “Aren’t you always full of surprises? No, actually, as we do interviews, we’re getting a lot of grousing from the homeowners here at the Resort. They’re getting fed up with the maintenance crew. They used to be a hard-working bunch, and Jason Adderley kept them in line, but lately things have changed. Jason never seems to be around anymore, and the other guys are taking advantage of it and goofing off. The rumor is that he’s been moonlighting: collecting a salary from the Anastasia Resort while he’s taking under-the-table, cash jobs, when he should be here. He used to have his own handyman business. People are saying he’s still working for his old customers. Mrs. Everson said she’d seen his truck parked in front of a house down in Summer Haven when he should’ve been on the clock at the Resort. She told Mrs. Foote about it, and she marched right down and reported it to Terri Jones, but nothing happened. And that’s another thing. He just bought a new truck. All tricked out and mighty pretty.”
“Yes, I heard that,” I said. “About the truck, I mean.”
Bruno shrugged. “Lots of talk going around. Most of it meaningless. Well, let us know if you think of anything.”
I realized I’d just had the unique experience of getting more information than I’d given, for once, and from a cop! For the second time, Bruno had left me wondering what it was he’d really wanted.
And like the other people who recognized the cat pendant, Bruno and Carver had gazed at it profoundly and said nothing. Lucky for them. I was getting tired of making disclaimers about me and the Great Beyond. I might have popped off.
* * * * *
“So who just called you?” Coco asked Patty brightly, once the police force had gathered itself up and actually left.
“Your daughter,” I guessed, “wanting to be sure her babysitter was coming back?”
“Oh!” Patty said. “I have to call her. And we have to call and extend the lease on the rental car.”
“I did it on my tablet. Now I know that wasn’t your daughter. Who was it?”
“Oh, that? It was just Benny.”
Score! Coco was being decent about it, but I could see the jaw muscles working from where I still sat at the dining room table. The other two were in the living room.
I couldn’t help myself. “How nice! And how about you, Coco? Has Sarge called?”
“Give the man a chance. It’s only been about 12 hours since I’ve seen him.”
“But he does have your number?” I said.
“Actually . . . .”
“Oh, Benny only has my number because he was having trouble with his phone muting itself unexpectedly. He kept missing calls, so he asked me to call him from mine so he could check it.” She said it with a completely straight face. “He must have realized he had me in his call log this morning when he wanted to talk to me.” Clever Benny.
“And what did he want to ask you?” I said, also with a straight face.
“He wanted to know if I wanted to have lunch with him today.”
“He’s golfing with Michael today,” I said. “They always have lunch together at the clubhouse afterward.”
“No, he said it was Sarge’s turn to golf with Michael’s group today.”
I knew darned well that Sarge only filled in for guys who had doctor’s appointments and hot dates. This, apparently, was the latter, and it had come up, shall we say, very suddenly?
“I get it,” I said. “As of this morning, he thought you were leaving today and he’d only have one more chance to see you. Sweet.”
I carefully avoided looking at Coco as I said it. She was draped in filmy materials like she was about to do the Dance of the Seven Veils, and had on just about what Salome was wearing underneath. The little bikini she’d purchased for the trip did not keep her from being naked, in my opinion.
“Of course, you told him no,” Coco said. “After all, we’re spending the day with Taylor, and we have to get ready to move to Cadbury House tomorrow.”
Patty sat there open-mouthed, and I jumped in and said, “Why don’t you and I get started on that while Patty’s out with Benny? Don’t worry. Now that you’re staying longer, we’ll have plenty of time to hang out and catch up.”
Never having been the one left behind to do the dirty work before, Coco didn’t know how to react. She looked thunderstruck. Or do I mean, like a thundercloud? Both, I guess.
Patty brushed by me and gave me a quick peck on the cheek. “You’re a doll. I gotta go. Benny’s picking me up in an hour, and I haven’t even showered yet.”
“But you don’t have a thing to wear!” Coco called out after her. “You can’t wear that dress from last night!”
Patty popped her head around the alcove doorway. “Oh, he said not to dress up; we’re just going to a little place on the beach that he likes, and it’s not fancy. I’ve got plenty of nice clothes. What are you talking about?”
She popped back, leaving me smiling into Coco’s scowl.
Chapter 15
I stood up, shook like a wet dog, and suggested we get to work packing.
We started with the things Coco had bought and not taken out of the shopping bags yet, simply heaving them into the backseat of the rental car. I suggested we take them over to UPS to ship home, but silly me, I’d forgotten she was staying longer and therefore not done shopping. Cadbury House was a mere 25 minutes from Sharla’s. What was I thinking?
She didn’t look like she was in the mood to mobilize for the move. In fact, what she was really wanted to do was to re-cast Patty and Benny as uncool kids being adorable but pitiful, somehow. I finally put a lid on it by telling her Sarge wasn’t the only substitute among Michael’s golfing buddies, and the man could have had the day free if he’d wanted. That bought me about fifteen minutes of dead silence, but Coco always snaps out of it, so I wasn’t worried. I enjoyed the quiet while it lasted.
Benny had picked Patty up right on time, and the happy couple had gone off inside their own little patch of sunshine. He gave Coco and me a nice but disinterested smile, and failed to notice or care about Coco’s Salome get-up.
“Well, I guess I’m stuck with you for lunch,” she said finally, glancing at her wrist. She was wearing a snake bracelet, not a watch, and had to ask me for the time.
“Just past noon. The Shack will be crowded on a Friday, but if all the tables are taken, we can sit at the bar. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”
She surprised me by saying, “Well, I’m happy for Patty. She deserves some fun. I just hope that old golf bag doesn’t break her heart. She’s so naïve. Look, I don’t think I’m in the mood to make happy talk at the bar. Why don’t we just
get carry-out and come back here?”
“Fine with me. We can talk better that way. With all the TVs on and the music going too, it can get loud at The Shack.”
I picked up my cell phone and ordered grouper sandwiches and fries, and we walked over to pick them up. It’s only about a block from the condo. Along the way, a couple of “gentlemen” in a bouncing pick-up blew wolf-whistles at Coco, and she brightened up.
When we got back to the condo with the bags of hot food, Jason Adderley was waiting around for us, trying to look busy with the automatic sprinklers.
* * * * *
He wanted to come in and talk. He gave a sharp, glancing frown at Coco, but seemed to decide he’d have to put up with her. I told him, no. Coco told him yes.
Actually, what she said was, “Of course you can! We can’t possibly eat all this by ourselves!”
I wasn’t sharing my food with Jason. Well . . . maybe a few fries.
So he came in and paced around while we set lunch out for ourselves, refused a bottle of water or anything else, and he continued to pace as we tried to eat in front of him.
After about three minutes of that, I said, “Jason, sit down. You’re giving me indigestion and I haven’t even eaten yet. Now, why don’t you just tell us what it is you want. I know you’ve been trying to talk to me since Tuesday, when you suddenly felt the need to fix our cabin floor, for which, thank you, by the way, you did a masterful job. But you really came out to the shelter hoping to see me, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. I did. Instead I got Myrtle hanging around getting in the way.” He’d sat next to me, and he began to pick French fries off my plate as if he didn’t even realize he was doing it. He ignored Coco, even when she let her wide-open neckline slide down one of her shoulders and left it there. He was wired up, nervous. Even afraid. I got very curious.
“That must have been fun,” I said. “Working away on all fours with Myrtle trying to be subtle while she interrogated you. Did you manage to get any useful information out of her while she was trying to get information out of you?”
He snorted. “She didn’t know anything. She hadn’t talked to you about the party yet.”
I was done with my lunch, and I shoved the leftover fries over to him. He picked one up and munched it morosely. It was a good, salty one, too. He didn’t even notice.
“Jason, you know darned well that I got to the party late and spent most of my time in the kitchen. I don’t know what happened to Fred. I didn’t see anybody tamper with his drink. The cops said that happened before I even got there. Why are you so nervous? Did you see something? If so, you should go to the police, not me.”
He looked at me sideways, then looked down at his hands. “You have a way about you. You seem to be able to work things out. Could you . . . you know . . . ?” He lifted his head enough to see the pendant of the cat goddess.
“Use magic? No. I don’t have any magic. I keep telling everybody that. I don’t know why they won’t believe me.”
“But you make things happen. You get things cleared up, and you do it your own way. If somebody’s not an angel, but they didn’t kill anybody, you handle it without getting the police involved, right?”
I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about.
No, maybe I could. There was a guy once. Kind of a wrong ‘un, but Jason couldn’t possibly know about that. Unless . . . Carlene! She’d been around at the time. Maybe he could know about that guy. In fact, I was suddenly sure he did.
“Maybe we should talk about what it is that you have done before we talk about what you haven’t,” I said.
“Oh, Taters, don’t be rude.”
“You keep out of this. Well, Jason?”
All three of us turned sharply as somebody at the door sang out, “Yoo hoo!”
Jason leapt to his feet.
Coco got up, looked through the storm door and said, “Come on in Candy. It’s open.”
“I gotta go,” Jason said. He moved a couple of steps, then stopped, turned, and came around to hunker down close to my ear. “Listen, can I call you if I need anything?”
I pulled my head back and looked at him. Then I shrugged. “Sure.” I wrote my cell phone number on one of the clean napkins and handed it to him. I didn’t ask for his, but he gave it to me anyway. It was a business card that said, “Jason Adderley, Certified Handyman Professional.” I stuck it in my purse and forgot about it.
“Thanks,” he muttered, dodging around Candy and Coco with a distracted nod.
“Oh, hi, Jason,” Candy said as he dodged around her. She looked at me. “Has he been sitting here goofing off? Really, the maintenance guys are starting to act like they’re here on vacation, like everybody else.”
I improvised and told her he had just finished some work we needed done and had an emergency call from another condo. Plumbing, you know. You gotta stick your finger in the dike fast or the wall suddenly crumbles. I think I actually said that.
I didn’t know why he would be afraid of Candy. If he was, he must have been the only person in the world who was. You couldn’t really take her seriously, with that hair and those clothes and the girly voice. She had on a beach cover-up that might have come off the same rack as Coco’s, but she didn’t have the figure or the posture to make it look good.
Coco came sailing back from escorting Jason to the door with her self-esteem restored. When it came to fashion, Candy couldn’t even carry the hem of Coco’s robe, and both ladies knew it. They eyed one another’s ensembles, complimented one another, and Coco flat-out won. No contest.
* * * * *
“You heard about Edith?” she said. “I feel all upset about it, and I just had to talk to somebody, and Harold won’t even answer the door. I even made him a breakfast casserole and took it over, standing on the doorstep feeling like a fool, and he wouldn’t answer. I know he’s in there! I had to take it back and stick it in the fridge. It was still warm from the oven and everything.”
“Maybe he wasn’t home,” I said. “After all, he has a lot to do now.”
“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.”
Breakfast casserole. I remembered all the home-baked goodies the ladies of Tropical Breeze had brought to Michael after his wife died. All the hopeful ladies. I wouldn’t have put it past Candy, but really! It hadn’t even been 24 hours.
“What kind of breakfast casserole?” Coco asked, looking interested and planting her elbows on the table.
Candy was sidetracked as easily as a little child, and I was a little relieved. The last thing I wanted was to have to tell Candy what Detective Bruno had told me about Edith’s death, when I was pretty sure she’d only run around the neighborhood exaggerating what I said, after giving me full credit for it. Candy, I decided, was an airhead.
They talked about Eggbeaters and low-fat cheese until I nearly went into a coma, and then Candy suddenly snapped me out of it by asking, out of the blue, “What did the cops want this morning?”
“Huh?”
“They were here. I saw them.”
Betty Everson had been right about Candy and the sink window. She’d been watching. I briefly considered whether or not the woman had hidden depths, then looked at her messy up-do and ridiculous ensemble and thought, “Nah.”
“Oh, they were only here for a little bit,” I said lightly. “I’m sure they’ll be more interested in talking to you, since you live right near the scene of the tragedy. Were you home at the time?”
“Yes! I still can’t quite make myself believe it. The bush they found her by is right next to my bedroom wall! I was actually in bed at the time, watching a movie. If you take that wall out, the whole thing happened not six feet from where I was at the time, a lone woman, laying helpless in her bed. I suppose that must be why I’m so jittery about it all. It might have been me!”
“How do you figure that?”
“Somebody was looking for a defenseless, tiny woman in the dark of the night . . . lurking there, flat against the wall, springing out fro
m behind the bush, reaching for her neck – oh, it had to be a maniac, don’t you think? He’s probably been stalking me, looking for a victim for a long time now, and I’m always in the group that sits around the pool and socializes after hours. I could have been coming home in the dark, all unsuspecting. But after all that’s gone on this week, I just didn’t have the heart to mix myself a drink and go on over last night. People do gossip so, don’t they? I can’t stand it when they do that. After all, a good man died.”
I took all this in without twitching an eyelid, and wondered if it was a clever bit of misdirection, pretending to be afraid, when Detective Bruno had said the killer could have been a woman. For Candy, there weren’t a lot of men left in the development. First Fred, now Harold? I pondered, watching her as she babbled on, trying to picture those sculptured nails grappling with a garrote. If she’d broken one of them, she could have just glued another one on. Idle thoughts like that went through my mind as I listened. Could somebody that silly really be a murderer?
Nah.
* * * * *
When we got to Cadbury House, I decided to let Coco start moving in by herself while I tried to get some work done. I’d put a lot of things off, thinking Coco and Patty were leaving Saturday, and now that they weren’t, I decided I’d better not get any further behind. Houseguests who invite themselves in at the last minute can’t expect to get your full attention. I would explain that to Coco, if necessary.
I went to the office and worked on the newsletter we send out to supporters once a month. At the last minute, we’d paste in stories about successful adoptions, along with pictures. I always seem to have lots of news. I did a quick report on the repair in The Cattery by a volunteer, and started an article about heartworm. I’d have Doc Miller review it before it went out, but I had my facts fresh in mind, since we were treating Gunther for it. I went into his story and got preachy about heartworm protection, especially in the South, making a note to our tech volunteer to put a picture of Gunther next to the article to give a face to the problem. He was very photogenic. Heartworm prevention is easy and relatively cheap, but once the dog is infected, treatment is expensive, and very hard on the dog.
