by Lillian Bell
None of that surprised me. The presence of Christine Brewer, however, did surprise me. Not many ex-wives attended funeral services. I hadn’t thought they were on such good terms. I especially thought Christine and Rosemarie weren’t on good terms, what with Rosemarie’s time with Alan overlapping his time with Christine by quite a bit. Yet there she was with a pile of crumpled tissues in front of her. I supposed Alan couldn’t be all bad if his ex-wife was mourning him, but then I passed behind the table close enough to hear her saying, “I just always thought I’d be able to get more money from him. Now that’s never going to happen.”
So not exactly mourning him, just his passing.
“How’s it going, Desiree?” a voice at my elbow asked.
I jumped. It was my job at these things to ask how people were doing, not for people to ask me. I turned. Rafe. Of course. “Fine, I think. Alan got a good turnout.”
“He did. Befitting a citizen as prominent as him.” Rafe nodded.
“You’re not here to pay respects, are you?” I asked.
He shrugged. “As much as a lot of these people are. You really think he’d have a crowd like this if he hadn’t been murdered? Well, that and the last time his widow attended a funeral, a fistfight broke out. Everyone wants to make sure they don’t miss anything.”
“You included?” I asked with raised eyebrows.
He smiled. “Of course.”
At least he didn’t have his camera out. Then a thought occurred to me. “You didn’t send someone into the viewing to take pictures of Alan in his casket, did you?”
To his credit, he turned a little green. “That is disgusting.”
“Yeah, but you and I both know that our profession is more than occasionally a little disgusting,” I pointed out.
“I didn’t think we shared a profession anymore.” He gestured at the room. “I thought this was your gig these days.”
My cheeks got hot. “It is. And one of my jobs is to maintain the privacy and dignity of our clients even if they’re murdered, so if I find out you sent that woman in to take a photo of Alan in his casket, I will make sure everyone in town knows it was you.”
He held up his hands in front of him. “I get why you’d be suspicious of me, Desiree. I’m not saying I’m above doing something like that, even if it does turn my stomach. I do, however, know my audience. The readers of the Verbena Free Press would be every bit as horrified as you seem to be if I printed a photo like that.”
He was right. We were a small town, and we had our noses deep in each other’s business, but there were limits. The lines may not be very well defined, but I was pretty sure snapping photos of dead people while paying respects was far, far on the other side of what Verbena considered good behavior. “Fine,” I grumbled. “Let me know if you hear anything about a photo like that, though, okay?”
“Will do.” He hesitated. “Anything interesting you can tell me from having dealt with the widow?”
“Something for you to print?” I asked.
He nodded.
“No comment.”
Suddenly, Nate was at my elbow. “Everything okay here, Desiree?” he asked.
I looked back and forth between Rafe and Nate, who both seemed to be trying to pull themselves up beyond their full heights. “I’m fine,” I said.
“I’ll be on my way,” Rafe said. “Stories to file and all that.”
We watched him walk away. “I don’t like that guy. I’m not sure why, but I definitely don’t like him.” He paused and looked around. “Does it seem awfully . . . blonde in here to you?”
Nate had always been a little faster to notice the ethnic makeup of a crowd than I had, but this one hadn’t struck me as particularly white. It had seemed more like Verbena itself. A mishmash. Mainly white, maybe, but with a healthy dose of other cultures and skin colors. Now I looked around. Maybe he was right. There were a lot of blondes. Trixie Warner from Bloom Where I’m Planted, Ella Keller from Fit ’n’ Fine, and Mandy Smith from Count on Me all had the same honey-blonde hues in their hair as Rosemarie and, come to think of it, Christine. I shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe they all go to Marie at Cut ’n’ Curl. That’s her color. Probably just a coincidence, though, don’t you think?”
“I think that’s a lot of coincidental blonde.”
Chapter Fourteen
I met Jasmine at Tappiano’s. She was already settled at what I was starting to think of as our table, by the big plate glass window in front. Happy hour was dedicated to sparkling wine and smoked oysters. Apparently, I had died and gone to heaven. I was not alone in that thought. The room filled up as we sat with people’s whose faces I knew from forever. Most waved. Some then whispered. Whatever. I turned my champagne flute around in slow circles on the table.
Jasmine dropped her hand on top of mine to stop me from fidgeting. “Don’t do that. You’re going to make the bubbles effervesce too quickly and it’ll go flat. So how weird was it dealing with Rosemarie?”
I scrunched up my face and thought. “Medium weird. She’s still too much in shock to be hard to deal with. She’s barely putting one foot in front of the other.” The vision of Rosemarie sitting staring at the plate in front of her as if she didn’t know quite what to do with food flashed into my brain. She’d made Lola and Kyle miserable, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have sympathy for her situation now.
“Grief is hard.” Jasmine took a sip.
“That’s your professional opinion?” I asked. Maybe I’d get it cross-stitched onto a pillow for her birthday present. She’d like that. It would go well with the one she had that said, “Get Over It.”
She nodded. “It’s especially hard when the death is sudden. People have all kinds of unresolved issues.”
Which reminded me of what I’d seen at the cemetery. “What’s the deal between Marie Ruiz and Alan?” There was definitely something unresolved there.
“Why would there be any deal?” she asked.
“She waited until everyone left the cemetery and then spit on his grave.” I was pretty sure that wasn’t a casual thing.
“Seriously?” Jasmine’s eyes went wide. “That’s some real hatred there, like medieval put-his-head-on-a-pike kind of hatred.”
“So probably not some casual disrespect, then? Not just a hatred for bankers in general?” I mulled that over. “No guesses?”
“I don’t know her that well, except to know she’s a way better stylist than anybody else over at Cut ’n’ Curl. More than half the people that go there insist on going to her.” She narrowed her eyes and looked at me. “You could use a cut, you know.”
I knew she was right. I’d been enjoying not having to worry about my hair and my eyebrows and my nails. When you worked on air anywhere, you always needed to be groomed. But if you worked on air in Los Angeles? You better look salon fresh every second. Appearances mattered. Here at home in Verbena? Not so much. “How bad is it?”
She gave me a thorough once-over. “You need a trim, and a little wax wouldn’t hurt your brow line one bit. You haven’t gone total hippie, but I don’t know how you’re ever going to catch a man with split ends like that.” She snorted.
“What about you? Do you go to her?” I asked. I’d always been jealous of Jasmine’s curls. They seemed to spiral out of her head with just the right amount of bounce. My own dark hair was a touch on the thin side.
She fluffed her hair. “Yes. I do. But as you know, getting a man isn’t on my agenda.”
We’d been in junior high when Jasmine had confided in me that she liked girls way better than boys. It had taken me a little while to understand what she mean because I had still been in a phase where I thought boys were loud and stinky, and who wouldn’t like girls better? Then I got it.
“Fine. I’ll make an appointment before my hair gets worse. Maybe I can find out why she hated Alan so much.” I ate another oyster. “Do you think Luke has even bothered to investigate if anybody besides Kyle could have shot Alan?” I took another sip of champagne.
Jasmine cocked her head to one side, making those curls bounce. “Why are you so sure that Kyle didn’t do it?”
I sat upright and blinked. “Because he’s Kyle. He wouldn’t. Besides, he said he didn’t.”
“Isn’t saying you’re innocent pretty much de rigueur when you’re accused of murder?” she asked.
“It’s Kyle,” I insisted. “I know him. I know he’s innocent.”
“Sure you know him. He was practically like a second dad to you. Do you really think you saw your own dad clearly?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dad had been easy to read. Always. Everything out in the open. Or at least, I thought everything had been. That key burned bright in my mind.
She held up her hands in front of her. “Nothing. That’s kind of the point. We don’t really see them as people. We think we know them, but we don’t. I mean, just the other day I found out that my dad played saxophone in a jazz band in his youth.”
I snorted. “Seriously? Your dad?” I loved Jasmine’s dad. If I had a third dad, it would totally be him. But Mr. Rodrigues with a sax? I didn’t think so.
“Yup. Found a photo stuffed in a drawer when I was looking for some paper clips and confronted him with it. He was surprised that I didn’t already know.” She traced an invisible pattern on the bar. “As children, I think there are things we don’t know about the adults in our lives because we don’t want to know. We want them to be there for us, and beyond that, we don’t really want to see them as people.”
I sighed. “And if they’re good parents, they don’t force us to see them as people either, do they?”
“Nope.”
We raised our glasses, clinked them together, and drank. “I need to go check on Donna. See you later?”
“Sure.” Jasmine signaled for the check.
Mark Tappiano came out from behind the bar and spread his hands out. “It’s all covered.”
“That’s so nice,” I said. “But you didn’t need to do that.”
He furrowed his brow. “I didn’t.”
Jasmine got very still. “Then who paid for our drinks?” she asked.
Mark shrugged. “Somebody dropped this off earlier.” He pulled an envelope out of his apron and handed it to Jasmine.
Jasmine pulled the contents out. She fanned four twenty-dollar bills out on the table along with a sheet of computer paper with a typed note on it:
Please use this money to pay for Ms. Jasmine Rodrigues’s bill on her next visit. Keep the change.
“Who?” Jasmine asked. “Who dropped it off?”
Mark shifted on his feet a little. “I don’t know. It was here when I got in. On the floor. I figured someone slipped it under the door. Should I not have used it?”
Jasmine held up her hand. “It’s fine, but no. Don’t use it. We’ll pay our own bill.”
“What should I do with the money?” he asked.
“Whatever you want. Give it to charity. Buy yourself something pretty. Just don’t use it to cover anything of mine.” Jasmine handed him a credit card.
“What’s going on?” I asked after Mark walked away.
“I’m not sure.” Jasmine chewed a little on her lower lip.
Now my eyes went wide. Jasmine didn’t usually look anxious, but she sure did now. She shook her head. “Just a few weird things. There was that chocolate on my car. Then someone replaced the lightbulbs in my porch lights. I thought it might be my dad, but he said no.”
I thought of the police report. “There was a report of a prowler in your neighborhood too.”
She sat up straight. “When?”
“Last week.”
She put her hand to her mouth. “That was around the time those lightbulbs got replaced. Wait. How did you know that?”
“I was looking at the police blotter.”
“You are seriously weird, you know that?” She shook her head.
“What do you think it means?” I asked.
“I really don’t know, but I think I’m going to have to find out.” We both turned slowly on our seats to look out the window of Tappiano’s as if her stalker might be standing right there. There was nothing to see but pajama man pulling into the Clean Green Car Wash in his truck coated with mud.
“Who is that guy anyway?” I pointed. Last time I’d been home, the view from this window had been of an open field. Granted, that field would have largely looked like a patch of dead weeds at the moment, but it had still been open space. Now there was a car wash—a car wash with two customers and about ten polo-shirted employees fussing over the cars. Even an eco-friendly car wash was a tough sell around here. A dusty car was a sign that you weren’t wasting water.
Before Jasmine could answer, Luke Butler walked in. “Death Ray! Jasmine! How’s it going?”
I sighed as he pulled a stool over to our table and sat. “Hello, Luke.”
He smiled, then turned to see what we were looking at.
“When did that go up anyway?” I asked.
“Six or seven months ago? Something like that. Right before the Dollar General, but after the In-n-Out?” Jasmine said, sounding like Monique for a moment.
I didn’t think a single new building had gone up when I’d lived here. Now businesses were popping up like moles in an arcade game. Verbena was growing. Too fast for my taste. “And who is that?”
“Who? There are like a dozen people over there.” Jasmine pushed the glasses toward me.
“Yeah, but only one in pajamas.” He kind of stood out.
“You mean Professor Moonbeam,” he said.
Professor Moonbeam? Of the dispensary and bakery? Interesting.
Monique came up to the table, still tying her apron around her waist. She must have come straight from the funeral. Her eyes looked red as if she’d been crying.
Luke turned to Monique. “You got beer back there?” he asked.
Monique stared straight ahead out the window and didn’t answer. I didn’t blame her. Who ordered a beer at a wine bar? It was like ordering a hamburger at a Chinese restaurant.
“Yo, Monique, honey.” Luke snapped his fingers, and she swung toward him. “Beer?”
“IPA okay?” she asked.
“More than okay.” Luke swiveled away from her to give me his full attention.
“So who exactly is Professor Moonbeam?” I asked, still curious and quite happy to have the subject of conversation change. “Is he an actual professor?” Verbena was situated about twenty miles north of a University of California campus and ten miles east of a state university. A lot of professors viewed it as a bedroom community.
Luke made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. “He was. Once. In the ag school, believe it or not. He decided to channel all that knowledge to grow weed.”
“It’s legal now, you know,” Jasmine pointed out.
Luke narrowed his eyes. “Barely. It still isn’t legal on a federal level. It’s a mess. A total quagmire.”
Jasmine turned to me. “Luke doesn’t approve of the marijuana business. He thinks marijuana is a gateway drug.”
“It is!” He protested.
“I think wine coolers are the real gateway drug.” They provided that first taste of an altered state. They got you hooked, and then you started looking for more. At least that’s the way I remembered high school drinking. I swiveled back around on my barstool. “So what do you have against Mary Jane?”
“It attracts the wrong elements. Even if it’s legal to possess it now, there are a lot of things around growing it and distributing it that aren’t.” Luke pressed his lips into a hard, straight line.
It pained me, but he was right. States were legalizing things left and right, but the Feds weren’t. Even in states where possession and growing were legal, not every county or city official felt the same way about it. Yet the arc of history is long, and it bends toward legalization. “Don’t you think it’s just a matter of time before all of it is?”
“Probably, but until then, having a marijuana far
m attracts a lot of people to the area that don’t respect the law. If they don’t respect one law, they probably won’t respect another one,” Luke said.
“What is it you think they’re going to do?” I asked.
“For one thing, I think a lot of them carry firearms. Somebody’s going to get shot,” Luke said.
A shiver went up my spine. Somebody had already been shot. Somebody who had been walking around with a Professor Moonbeam’s Dispensary and Bakery wrapper in his pants pocket. “You wouldn’t arrest anyone for using, though, would you?”
He shook his head. “It’s not illegal. There’s nothing to arrest them for.”
“So just having been a customer wouldn’t be enough to get you in trouble?” I asked. That wrapper in Alan’s pocket didn’t indicate anything more incriminating than us having a glass of wine then, as long as the bank didn’t have a no-tolerance drug policy.
He looked at me hard. “No. I can’t see how it would. Why?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure if it meant anything yet. Probably just another dead end. “Nothing.”
“I don’t think you’re going to be able to stop any of this,” Jasmine said. “It’s going to be as respectable and accepted as drinking in a few years. People will have pyramids of joints at weddings next to the champagne fountains.”
Luke said, “It might be legal, but I don’t like anything associated with the drug trade in my town.”
“Your town?” I snorted. “Since when is Verbena your town?”
“Since forever.” He cocked his head. “Don’t tell me you don’t feel the same way about this town.”
Monique returned with Luke’s beer and set it down in front of him. Or almost in front of him. She was so busy staring out the window that she almost missed the table. Luke grabbed the beer just in time.
