“I didn’t. I called a cab to take me to the office.”
I smiled again and this time leaned over the counter to give Joel a small smooch on the lips.
The breakfast “rush” came and went, and Joel headed home to catch up on some desperately needed sleep. Patty left after showing Jonathan how to make three different kinds of cookies and a chocolate silk pie.
We had plenty of white chicken chili left over from yesterday, so I put Jonathan to work making more cookie dough that could be stored in the cooler, to be baked fresh when needed. And when Zoey showed up at the back of the kitchen to pick me up, I abandoned ship for the sake of finding Hank’s elusive killer.
So far, the facts were pointing to Guy, the gym’s owner, and Samantha, Brad’s sister, as the most likely suspects.
Slipping into the passenger seat of Zoey’s car, I tapped out a text for Brad. “Toxicology report back on Hank’s supplement from the gym?”
My phone dinged almost immediately with a reply. “The report’s in. Give me a few to sweet talk Martha into letting me see the results.”
I had no idea who Martha was, but if Brad could get the results out of her then I honestly didn’t care.
Zoey reached the gym before the phone dinged again. I glanced at it then held it up for Zoey to read.
“So it was poisoned,” Zoey said after she’d read Brad’s text.
Hank had been killing himself by way of his own nutrition supplement, scoop after scoop. He just hadn’t known it.
“That means the killer really is most likely someone at the gym, someone with access to Hank’s locker,” I said.
“And everyone had access to his locker.”
“Yeah.” I stared at the gym’s front door. “Do you think it was Guy?”
“He didn’t have anything to gain,” Zoey said, “but he didn’t necessarily know that.”
I really, really didn’t want Samantha to be Hank’s killer, yet it didn’t feel right to hope that Guy had done it. When he was caught—and he would get caught—murdering Hank would ruin his life.
I unbuckled my seatbelt, and we headed in. I eyeballed Andy on the way in. He was at the front desk looking as clueless as ever. His shoulders were slumped, his head hung lazily forward, and his eyes were blank, but I had his number. He was a not-so-dumb guy behind a dumb-as-rocks persona. He could have been the killer. He had the opportunity, but what would’ve been the motive? He’d said that Hank had been nice to him. There was nothing financial for him to gain. He’d blushed when he’d looked Zoey up and down the first time we’d met him, so it wasn’t a situation of unrequited love. Unless he liked to kill for kicks, he wasn’t our guy.
“We need to talk to Guy,” I told him.
“He’s in his office.”
“We’ll show ourselves back,” I told him. He opened his mouth to object, but we didn’t hang around to hear it and went on our way.
We didn’t find Guy in his office. Instead we found him spotting weights for Hannah as she lay on her back lifting a bar filled on both ends with large disks. Guy stood at the top of her head and kept his fingers barely touching the bar as Hannah lifted. Guy was wearing long jean shorts and a T-shirt that pulled tight enough over his chest to show off that his old bones still had a good deal of muscle on them. Hannah wore splash colored yoga leggings under running shorts and a pink sports bra that doubled as a halter top.
“Not you two again,” Guy said when he spotted us.
Hannah spared us a glance and then let the bar fall onto its high mount with a clang. She sat up and wiped her face with the small towel that was around her neck.
“Mind if we talk to you a few minutes, Guy?” I asked. I didn’t think he’d like to be questioned about murdering one of his customers in front of another one of his customers.
“Nope, whatever you got to say, say it here. I’ve got work to do, and the two of you have already taken up too much of my time.”
Well, this was awkward.
“Why’d you kill Hank?” Zoey asked. One of these days she was going to get somebody to crumble and confess right then and there.
“You’ve got some nerve,” Hannah said, looking at me. “First you and that pretty boy accost me at work, and now you’re here hounding poor Guy.” She turned to Guy. “We should call our lawyers and file harassment claims against them.”
Thankfully, Guy wasn’t biting. He looked just as annoyed at Hannah’s suggestion as he had at me and Zoey showing up.
“What are you talking about?” he asked Zoey. “I already done told you. I didn’t kill Hank. Why would I want to?”
“Because you were ticked that Hank wouldn’t change his business model for his online exercise equipment store,” I said.
Guy put his hands on his hips and squared his feet. “Yeah, you’re right. Hank refused to play ball, but do you know what he did do?”
I shook my head.
“He walked me through how to set up an online store of my own. We’re talkin’ the works. He helped me every step of the way, and he never asked for nothin’ in return ‘cause that’s the kinda guy he was. I didn’t kill Hank and if I knew who did, I’d put their head right through a brick wall.”
Dang it. I believed him. And if Guy was innocent… that only left Samantha.
My stomach felt like someone had dropped a big rock in it. It felt awful.
“If you’re wantin’ to pin his death on someone, you should be lookin’ at all them women he was sleeping with,” Guy went on to say.
Hannah looked up at him where she still sat on the weightlifting bench. “What women?”
“The women!” Guy said, throwing up his hands.
“That doesn’t answer the question,” Zoey pointed out.
Guy rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Do I gotta spell it out? Hank was a dog. He was sniffin’ up every skirt that walked by him.”
I glanced at Hannah. She looked confused.
“Hannah, did Hank ever try to sleep with you?”
“No, and that was on the table.” Guy turned and looked at her, and she took a turn at throwing her hands up in the air. “You might as well know. Before Hank died, I’d been talking to him about fathering a child for me and my partner.”
“Your partner?” Guy asked.
“Yesss, my partner.” Hannah reached down, picked up her phone off the floor next to the bench and clicked it to life. A picture of her with a beautiful woman with mocha skin filled the screen.
“I never knew you was like that,” Guy said.
“Like what?” Hannah asked, her sharp voice a clear warning that he should choose his next words carefully.
Guy eyed her leerily. “Family oriented.” He put intense emphasis on each syllable.
“Humph,” Hannah responded.
“Did you ever see Hank come on to any women?” I asked Hannah.
“No. He was always friendly—real friendly—but I never saw him cross the line.”
“Did his friendliness ever make any of the women uncomfortable? Or did you ever see any women start trying to avoid him?”
She shook her head. “I never saw him be anything other than… gracious. Well mannered. I mean, he was attentive and I think women got crushes on him easy, but I never saw him get handsy or get up in someone’s space.”
“Did you ever see him do anything?” I asked Guy.
“Well he was always with a woman. Always talkin’. Always standin’ close.”
“And you thought that meant he was sleeping with them… or trying to get them to sleep with him?”
Guy ran his hand through his hair. “Now you’re just makin’ me feel dumb.” He shrugged. “I guess I just assumed.”
Zoey and I looked at each other and then looked back at Guy.
“Who else assumed?” Zoey asked.
It was Guy’s and Hannah’s turn to look at each other. When they looked back at us, they answered in unison.
“Vic.”
“Hank and Vic’s ex spent a lot of time togethe
r when Ellen would be in the gym,” Hannah said. “Vic asked me if she’d said anything about Hank.”
“Had she?” I asked.
Hannah shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. She might have. Nothing stands out. The only vibe I ever got from them was that they were friends. Besides, Hank was dating Sam. He might not have advertised it, but he didn’t hide it either. We all knew. The way he was with Sam when she was here working out with him was different than the way he was with other women.”
“Different how?” I asked.
“More… intimate. There was a shared body language between them. A shorthand. They were tight.”
“And you didn’t see that when he’d be around other women?”
“No,” she shook her head.
“Vic ever say anything to you about Hank and Ellen?” I asked Guy.
Guy looked like he wanted to hedge on the answer, but then he spoke. “Yeah, he said that if she wanted to get on with other men then that was her business but that she was being disrespectful to him to do it here in front of him.”
“So Vic was convinced that Hank and Ellen were having an affair,” I said.
“No, no…” Guy said, waving his hands. “Vic’s a good guy. Never been no trouble, and he’s been through it with the divorce. He was over the moon for Ellen. It’s been hard on him to see her move on, but he’s handled it.”
I wasn’t hearing anything in what Guy just said to make me think that Vic wasn’t the killer.
“I think it was Ellen,” Hannah said.
“Ellen? How’s that?” I asked. Her throwing Ellen’s name into the mix didn’t make sense.
“Ellen tried to leave Vic several times, and he’d go after her and get her back. But this last time she left him, he ended up in the hospital with food poisoning. He didn’t look good for weeks.” She looked at Guy. “You remember that?”
“Yeah, I do,” Guy answered with his brows pressed close enough to each other to almost become one. “He was downright green around the gills. Looked bad. Real bad. Was that when that was, when she left him?”
“Yeah,” Hannah answered.
It was time to go have a chat with Vic. We needed to know more about his black widow ex.
27
I called Jonathan as soon as we made it out to Zoey’s car.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, boss. Everything’s good. I fried up some cornbread. It’s got that white chicken chili of yours flying out the door. Couple people even got some extra to go.”
I was sure that was a testament to Jonathan’s cornbread and not my chili.
“You gonna be a while longer, boss?”
“I am.”
“You’ve got the scent now, don’tcha?” he asked, sounding excited.
I laughed despite the fact that we were on the trail of a woman who had possibly poisoned twice, meaning she wouldn’t be shy about poisoning again. “We’re definitely narrowing it down.”
“Well I’m good today, boss. You go do what you gotta do. I can stay as long as you need.”
A weight I hadn’t realized I was carrying lifted off my chest. Hearing those words come out of Jonathan’s mouth was like nirvana. Despite that, I knew that I couldn’t take him for granted. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said.
“Want me to prep some lasagna for supper?”
I wanted to reach through the phone and hug the man, but I settled for saying, “That’d be great!”
I clicked off and watched as Zoey typed Vic’s address into her phone. Guy had been more than happy to give it to us, despite privacy rules that forbade him from doing just that.
“Got it,” Zoey said when the directions on how to get to Vic’s house came up on her phone. “Take about twenty minutes to get there.”
“Think we’d be better off catching him at work?”
“Naw,” Zoey said as she tapped some more on her phone. She flashed me its face. It was Hank’s Facebook wall, and a bunch of people were consoling him on getting laid off from work.
“Ouch,” I said. His wife left him and he lost his job. There weren’t very many blows to the ego that were harder to take than those.
I buckled up, and Zoey put the car in drive.
Like so many other people in town, Vic lived outside the city limits. But unlike many others, he lived in a sprawling housing community. The houses were nice enough, though nothing close to palatial, but the yards were enormous by Chicago standards.
“This is it,” Zoey said, pulling into the driveway of a cream-and-red-colored bungalow with a long covered porch and four railing-to-roof columns.
We got out, and I peeked through the high window of his attached garage. “His car is here and something big with a tarp over it. Can’t tell what.”
“I could see Ellen living here,” Zoey said as she looked over the front of the house and the stepping stone walkway that lead through the yard to the porch. “This place is nice. Girly, even. Vic’s a Neanderthal. Doesn’t fit him.”
I thought of Vic standing next to Ellen in front of the house. They looked good. Then I considered each separately, standing alone on the porch. Ellen looked right at home; Vic looked like a cold sore on a supermodel’s lip.
Zoey was right. He didn’t fit.
We walked the path to the front of his house, climbed the steps of his porch and knocked on his door. Vic had a beer in his free hand when he opened the door. It was barely past noon. I plastered a smile on my lips and pretended not to notice.
“Vic! Just the man we were hoping to see.” Lamest opener ever considering that we were the ones who had shown up at his house in hopes of seeing him.
“What do you want?” His speech wasn’t slurred, but his eyes were reminiscent of Joel’s from earlier that morning. I suspected he’d been drinking for hours. He was wearing jeans and a sleeveless muscle shirt, and boy-oh-boy did he have muscles. His arms looked reminiscent of a blowup muscle costume someone might wear on Halloween.
He didn’t look pleased to see us. He wasn’t going to let us in the door unless we gave him a reason to care about us coming in.
“Ellen’s in trouble,” I said. For once, I wasn’t telling a lie.
Vic pulled back his head and knitted his brows in confusion. Then, stepping out of the way of the door, he waved us in with his beer holding hand.
Stepping into the house, it wasn’t what I’d expected. Framed, happy pictures of Vic and Ellen dotted the wall in an artful design that had taken care and time to create. A decorative plate hung over an open doorway that led into the dining room. And a vining ivy traveled a trellis fixed into place along the ceiling’s edge. There was a gold and green throw on the back of the couch that mirrored the colors in the area rug beneath the pastel yellow painted coffee table. Nothing about the place gave any indication that it was being lived in by a bachelor.
“Vic,” I said with a light-hearted laugh, “I never imagined you had such a way with decorating.”
“Oh,” Vic said, rubbing the back of his neck. He smiled a toothy grin that made him look charming despite the mid-day beer in his hand. “Ellen’s got a real eye for this kind of thing.”
“Did she help you redecorate after she moved out?”
“Huh? No,” he answered with a sharpness in his tone.
No furniture seemed to be missing. No stylishly feminine knickknacks were out of place. The home was picturesque… and most likely just the way Ellen had left it. It seemed odd that the man would want to keep her around in spirit after she’d tried to kill him. Of course, it was possible that he didn’t know she’d tried.
“You said Ellen’s in trouble?” Vic prompted as he sat down on a chair adjacent to the couch.
“Can you tell us about when you got sick and ended up in the hospital?” I asked.
“What’s that got to do with Ellen being in trouble?” He sat back and crossed his ankle over his knee. “She didn’t have anything to do with that.” He took a long swig of his beer.
His mou
th had become tight and his eyes glinted. I didn’t believe him. Whether or not Ellen had something to do with him ending up in the hospital, he thought she did.
Wanting to put him at ease, I moved to sit on the couch and Zoey followed my lead. I sat forward on the end of the cushion with my elbows on my knees. “What did put you in the hospital? You were in there for several days, weren’t you?”
“I’ve got an ulcer. It ruptured.”
He’d bled. Internally. Just like Hank, except that Hank had died.
“Do they know what caused it?” I asked.
“The rain in Spain. They don’t know Jack.” He was getting irritated, and I wondered how drunk he was.
I sat back on the couch and crossed my legs. From where I sat, I could see through the dining room and into the kitchen. I let my brain wander and race at the same time. We needed more information. If we were going to prove that Ellen killed Hank, we needed proof that poison was her go-to method for knocking somebody off.
“Had your stomach been hurting for a while before the ulcer ruptured?” I asked.
Vic looked at me like an idiot. “What do you think? It’s an ulcer.”
I couldn’t help it. My gaze shifted to the half-empty beer he had in his hand. I didn’t know if it would hurt an ulcer, but I couldn’t imagine it would help.
Vic didn’t miss the change in my attention. He sat forward in his seat and wagged the can. “You two want one?”
I wasn’t sure if he was sincerely offering or if he was taunting us.
I opened my mouth to answer but Zoey’s “Yes” is what came out. I looked at her, giving her a what-are-you-doing look when Vic got up and headed into the kitchen.
“Brad said that Hank died from an anticoagulant, right?” she whispered.
“Yeah…?” I mouthed.
“So we need to see his medicine cabinet.”
“If he’s got a bleeding ulcer, why in the world would the doctors put him on an anticoagulant?” I whispered.
“Who says they did!”
A Berry Home Catastrophe Page 18
