Killer Pancake gbcm-5

by Diane Mott Davidson

  My muscles trembled with fatigue. The gentle susurration of prayer rose from the pews all around, and scraps of remembered conversation surfaced in my mind. About Claire: That woman could sell cosmetics…. From Nick: We’re reviewing the films. From Frances Markasian: They’ve got a security problem. From Babs Braithwaite: There’s somebody back there.

  But the police had their man: Shaman Krill. Krill, or somebody else that Reggie Hotchkiss had hired, or maybe even Reggie himself, could have done it all. Claire was a fabulous saleswoman, so Reggie certainly had motivation to get rid of one of the competitor’s best producers. Reggie further undermined Mignon’s sales with his bogus Spare the Hares campaign. Covering all the bases, he also copied their products in his own catalogue.

  Had Reggie covered all the bases with Nick Gentileschi, though? That was what didn’t fit. Why would someone have to kill the security chief? Because of potentially embarrassing photographs? Because of something that had turned up on the films? What about the cash refund problem? Frances had said, It’s all computerized, so it looks official. But what was official? I had seen stacks of computer printouts in the department store office. Would they detail transactions, or would those be in the ledger?

  Someone touched my shoulder; I opened my eyes.

  “We’re passing the peace,” a woman told me. She had gray hair pulled back in a neat bun, crinkles around her eyes, and a worried smile. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine, thank you.” I stood quickly and shook her hand. “The peace of the Lord.”

  She smiled and squeezed my hand. “Peace.”

  Which was what Arch had said. And Reggie Hotchkiss, the plagiarizing pacifist.

  With enormous effort I turned my attention back to the service and went through the communion portion of the liturgy. Afterward, the tired crowd engaged in halfhearted chat, and I nabbed a cup of church coffee. The stuff tasted like something you would lick off the inside of a twenty-year-old aluminum pot.

  It was nine-fifteen. As I climbed into the van, the curious voices rocketing around in my brain began shooting off again. What could that camera above the Mignon counter record? What did the printouts and the ledger show? If Shaman Krill was under arrest, what harm could it do if I went down to the store and just looked around a little bit? If I could be there when Prince & Grogan opened, maybe I could snoop uninterrupted. If somebody like Stan White bothered me, I could use as my excuse the fact that I was looking for the receipt that Frances was so furious I’d lost.

  I revved the van and took off for the mall. When I arrived, I realized that people were as reluctant to shop on the morning of July the fifth as they were to go to church. I felt foolish going into Prince & Grogan when the doors were finally unlocked. The place was virtually empty.

  When I arrived at the department store offices, I announced to the woman behind the credit window: “I need to see Lisa in accounts payable. Is she in yet?”

  “I don’t know. You can check.”

  Lisa was not in. I rifled through the stacks of printouts on her office floor until I came to the one marked Cosmetics. I scanned each of the folded pages, but they yielded only columns of numbers, and then rows of numbers across from the columns under headings like YTD. Doggone it.

  Determined, I picked up the accordion-folded sheaf, slipped the printout under my blouse, and headed out of Lisa’s office. If I compared the printout to the ledger, maybe it would all make sense. Hugging the printout to my body, I rode down the escalator.

  The Mignon counter looked as if a bomb blast had hit it. Tape held together the web of remaining glass. Plywood covered the bare spots. The broken blind was also haphazardly covered with strips of plywood. Harriet Wells, her blond hair frothed up in another of her twists, her Mignon uniform crisp, was tidying up. She looked up at me with a surprised, happy face.

  “You’re the last person I expected to see here!” she said with a high, tinkly laugh. She sat on her stool beside the counter and scowled. “This is always a slow morning.”

  I shifted the printout around and said, “Listen, Harriet, I’m looking for a receipt that I might have dropped in here the other day, when Nick fell—” She tilted her head at me appraisingly, then closed her eyes and shuddered. “—anyway,” I went on, “the purchase wasn’t for me, it was for someone else, and now they’re wanting the receipt, and blaming me that I lost it.”

  Before she could answer, a male customer came up to the far side of the counter and began to test perfumes. Harriet slid off her stool, came over to the counter and reached underneath for a Tupperware container of muffins.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked with a bright smile.

  My stomach reminded me that I had had quite a bit of caffeine and nothing substantial in the last three hours. “Of course. Especially for something you’ve baked.”

  “These are made with sour cream,” she confessed as she took the top off the container. “But see if you can guess the other ingredient. You’re so good at that.”

  I took a bite. Sour cream, though fattening, was a good ingredient for keeping things fresh. I even had a pound cake recipe that required that the finished cake be wrapped for twenty-four hours before being served. The muffin was buttery, rich, and delicious. It was flecked with tiny bits of green that tasted like mint.

  “Can’t tell what it is,” I said, then looked down at the customer testing perfumes. It was Reggie Hotchkiss. My heart sank.

  “Okay, Harriet,” he crowed. “Tell me what was so important you had to see me on a Sunday morning.”

  “Look in the trash, if you want,” Harriet said over her shoulder. “This shouldn’t take long … I never tell Hotchkiss a thing. You can try in front of the counter too, although the cleaning crew’s been in to vacuum up all the glass and … you know.”

  Did I ever. I scooted behind the counter and slipped the computer paper out of my blouse. What a relief. I just hoped Harriet hadn’t seen it When Reggie quizzed Harriet and sprayed one cologne on his right arm, the other on his left, I looked up at the security camera. From where it was positioned, it could take in the entire front of the counter, the cash register—at right angles to the counter—and the file cabinets and storage areas behind the counter.

  Harriet was murmuring questions to Reggie, and he replied more expansively and loudly to each inquiry. Eventually he began to yak about perfume, citrus versus floral, pine versus patchouli. He seemed to be ignoring me, but I’d seen him do that before. I took another bite of muffin.

  First things first. I put the computer paper beside the large blue ledger that I’d seen Dusty flipping through Thursday, the first day I’d visited the Mignon counter. Then I squinted at the file drawer. I remembered Dusty writing down all the information about my complexion and putting it on a client card. Would it be filed under my name or Dusty’s? I took another careful bite of muffin and slid open the file drawer. Routt. Satterfield. Wells. Each file was jammed with the cards. Dusty had the least, Claire’s file bulged, and Harriet had the most, which would make sense since she’d been working for Mignon the longest. I wondered if Dusty’s was slender because she hadn’t been working there as long as the others or because she was less successful. Or could it be because she’d been moving client cards over to Hotchkiss Skin & Hair?

  Harriet looked around to see what I was doing. I held up the muffin with one hand, while making an enthusiastic okay sign with the other. She nodded, rolled her eyes in exasperation, and turned back to Reggie. He seemed to be enjoying making Harriet uncomfortable. I slid the file drawer closed and walked over to the trash receptacle. It was empty. My eye fell on the ledger and printout. I struggled with my conscience for thirty seconds, then opened the ledger first. If Claire was a top sales associate that Reggie was trying to get rid of, the proof should be in there, and be easier to read than the printout. Maybe they would subpoena the ledger at Reggie’s trial.

  I reached over and helped myself to another green-speckled muffin as I turned the ledger pages and tried to deci
pher them.

  “Goldy!”

  I looked around. Dusty was standing by the lipsticks looking disheveled and tired, but ready to work in her Mignon smock. “Why is Reggie Hotchkiss here on a Sunday morning, do you know? What are you doing here? My God, look at this mess.”

  I felt immediate guilt. What was I doing, anyway? “I’m just looking at this sales ledger. Show me what’s what as compared to the printouts, will you? Did Claire have good sales?”

  Dusty glanced down at Reggie and Harriet, then said, “Well, I guess so.” She moved to the ledger. “She was getting there. Let’s see.” She flipped expertly through the ledger pages and then ran a gnawed fingernail across a row of columns. “April, I had eight hundred in sales, Claire had fifteen hundred twenty-two, Harriet had—whoa! three thousand and fifty.” She flipped a page. “May, I didn’t do so hot. Six-fifty. Claire had two thousand eighty and Harriet had twenty-five hundred. See? That’s what happens when the weather’s warm. People don’t shop.”

  “Were you planning to take your clients over to Hotchkiss Skin & Hair?” I inquired.

  Dusty put her finger to her lips and looked both ways. Harriet and Reggie were indeed watching us. “Shh! You want to get me into trouble?”

  “Tell me this,” I said in a very low tone. “Did you take the receipt out of my bag at Hotchkiss Skin & Hair while I was getting my facial?”

  “Goldy! God! What’s the matter with you? What receipt?”

  I decided to cast the bait out one more time. “I’m sorry, I guess it’s just because of your grandfather, and because you were expelled from Elk Park Prep. For stealing.”

  She colored deeply. “Ex-cuse me?”

  “Well, why were you expelled from Elk Park Prep? Wasn’t it for stealing?” I had a sudden, devastating thought. “Or because you were pregnant? With Colin?”

  She turned around and closed the book with a dramatic thwack. “I’m like … who told you that?”

  “Well, Julian wasn’t sure….”

  Dusty rolled her made-up eyes dramatically. “It wasn’t for stealing. And my mother was pregnant, not me. I told you, the woman does not know the meaning of birth control. I was expelled for drinking. I mean, Julian should know, he was there!”

  “For drinking.”

  “Yes—in that stupid bio class we had together. We had to do some dumb test about chlorophyll. We were putting sugar into grain alcohol and then placing strawberry leaves in the solution, and then we had to wait for something to happen, God knows what. I mean, it was way boring.” She lifted her hands and shook them like a frustrated Italian shopkeeper. “So I figured, hey. We’ve got strawberries, we’ve got sugar, we’ve got booze. We’ve got daiquiris! So I … Goldy, what’s wrong?”

  What was wrong? My knees felt rubbery. My hands were trembling. Damn, but I must be more tired than I thought.

  “Okay, look,” I said impatiently. “Just show me how the printout compares to the ledger. Please,” I added.

  Dusty flipped the ledger back open and then shuffled the fingers of her free hand through the printout. When she came to the right pages, her pretty face wrinkled in puzzlement as she looked first at the ledger, then at the printout, then back at the ledger.

  “Something’s wrong here,” she said, exasperated. “The printout has Claire’s figures for June much lower than what she put in the ledger, because of some big returns—”

  There was a sudden pop. I looked incredulously at the top of the sales ledger. It had been torn … it had been shot.

  Dusty looked over her shoulder and grabbed me.

  Pop! went another bullet, smack into the glass case containing makeup. The glass shattered and tan-colored stuff began to spill down the shelves. What in the …?

  “Move away from that book, Dusty,” said Harriet’s voice.

  Holding me tight either to protect herself or me, Dusty let out a small shriek. Together, we stumbled backward. I couldn’t see Reggie Hotchkiss.

  Harriet was holding a small gun. She shot at my hand that had pulled the ledger down off the counter. I dropped the book and dived into the aisle.

  “What the hell, Harriet!” Dusty crawled over to my side and glared at the other saleswoman. “What the hell is the matter with you? Put that down! We weren’t doing anything. Go away!” she yelled at Reggie, who was advancing down the aisle. “Reggie, help! We’ve got a gun here!”

  Reggie shouted something unintelligible and ran toward the exit. I started to crab-walk sideways toward the entrance of the shoe department.

  “You just had to know,” said Harriet acidly as she came steadily toward me. “Questioning Nick. Sucking up to Dusty. Going after Reggie. You said he was the one who knew too much. That’s why I told him to come here this morning. But it’s you. And now you’re getting into the printouts. Did you view the films, too?”

  “Put the gun away, Harriet!” Dusty yelled. “Look out, Goldy!”

  Harriet pivoted and strode toward Dusty. Again the little gun went pop.

  “You bitch!” shouted Dusty. Crimson blossomed on the sleeve of her Mignon smock. “You shot my arm! God-damn you!” Holding her arm, Dusty scrabbled toward Shoes.

  I tried to move my legs, to get them underneath me. Harriet turned back and walked carefully in my direction. Why couldn’t I move? Why did my hands and feet tingle? I knew foods … I knew poisons … Something grown right near here.

  “Hemlock,” I said as loudly as I could as she neared me once again. “You put hemlock in the muffins. You made them and were waiting to give them to Reggie after he blabbed about all he’d learned about Mignon. Only, he didn’t know anything.”

  “Right,” said Harriet, and fired again.

  I thanked God she was a lousy shot when the bullet ripped through the upholstery of one of the seats in the shoe department A deafening clang split the air. Someone—Dusty?—had tripped the fire alarm. Startled, Harriet whipped around, momentarily distracted, and I grunted ferociously and mustered every bit of strength to bring my legs underneath me. I was only five steps away from the escalator. With the few people left in the store now heading for the exits, I floundered toward the moving steps. Where was I going? My body was going numb. Was it the hemlock? Or had Harriet actually shot me? Where the hell was Security? It felt as if I were being taken over by Novocain. I’d figure out what to do if I could just get to the second floor. The steps moved. I tried to duck.

  Harriet was whirling around, confused. Looking for me. I went lower on the steps, under the escalator’s metal railing. Had she seen me? Hard to tell. I felt my heart beating as I thought hard. The sales figures: Harriet had been the leading sales associate, but Claire had been closing in fast on her, according to what Dusty had shown me in the ledger. Claire had reported her client cards had been stolen. I knew who had committed the theft. And maybe it was the theft of the client cards that Nick Gentileschi had seen on the tapes. Or perhaps he’d seen, on closeup, who it was that was carefully palming cash receipts and giving herself the stolen refunds, while charging the returns to other associates’ numbers.

  Half prone, I scrambled up the cold metal steps of the escalator, which seemed to be moving with preternatural slowness toward the second floor. Yes, Harriet knew the ins and outs of this business. She knew what Nick Gentileschi was up to behind the mirrors in the women’s fitting room. She’d probably offered to trade her knowledge of his illegal activities for his silence and the photos of Babs. It wouldn’t have been too hard for Harriet to convince Mr. Kinky Gentileschi that she was willing to have some kind of interesting encounter up in the blind. Hell, she’d probably offered to bribe him in the way he enjoyed best. Then she’d put the incriminating photos in his pocket, I wagered, to implicate the Braithwaites in his death.

  “Goldy!” Harriet shouted. “I just want to talk to you!”

  Yeah, sure. Like when she followed us down to the mall to see where Claire parked so that she could order her out to get something from her car. Like when she threw bleach water on me when I�
�d started snooping around. Or when she’d watched outside my house, so she could see if I headed down for the mall and the telltale printout sometime, maybe early in the morning, when she wasn’t personally working at the cosmetics counter.

  Finally I was at the top of the moving stairs. Not yet sure of how much muscular control I still had, I rolled wildly onto the floor and hit a china display. The whole thing toppled over with an ear-splitting crash. I cursed and hauled myself to my feet. I had an absurd vision of Socrates: How much time did hemlock take to kill someone? But I knew something the doomed philosopher hadn’t. Thank God for Pete the espresso man’s advertising. I’d learned the antidote for hemlock from his pamphlet. It was one of my favorite substances: coffee. And I’d had enough of it this morning—a four-shot latte and a big, strong cup after church—that the poison wasn’t having the swift, lethal effect Harriet envisioned. I just needed more caffeine, and quick.

  I could hear her heels rap-tap-tapping up the escalator. I tottered recklessly through the bathing suit department. Harriet would be up here any moment with her little gun. I didn’t have time to get to the exit. She’d see me and catch up. Damn, damn, damn. Then I noticed the dressing room. Hope bloomed. Could I still have the stolen key in my pocket? I certainly hoped so.

  Moving seemed a little easier at this point, and I had the absurd thought that perhaps hemlock was like heroin. If you kept propelling yourself around during an overdose, things might not end up so badly. I groped in my pocket, found the key, and fumbled to unlock the door to the storage room. I turned the handle and prayed. It opened. I careened into the darkness.