A Berry Clever Corpse

by WINTERS, A. R.

  It was clear: if they did know something, they weren’t telling. Did that mean that they were protecting someone? Or was it that they didn’t want to get involved? But Derek had already gotten involved. He’d called 911. It was an action that had the police interviewing him for forty-five minutes. The whole time they had talked to him, he looked as though he’d wanted to crawl out of his skin and slither away, leaving an empty husk for the police to question.

  “You guys want a ride to the shelter?” Zoey asked. “Like you said, it’s due to turn extra cold.”

  “No,” Patty said curtly and then sneezed. It was a wet and disturbing sound, but not half as disturbing as the chest echoing cough that followed. I resisted the urge to take a step away. Barely.

  “What’s wrong with going to the shelter?” Zoey pushed.

  The group looked at each other and then Derek, their habitual spokesman, spoke up. “Cory Gardener. He keeps threatening to kill Manny in his sleep, and he pushed Patty into the wall when nobody weren’t looking.”

  I knew Zoey and I couldn’t stay, but walking away didn’t feel right either. These people had so little, yet their need was so great. And they hadn’t asked us for anything.

  “I’ve got cakes,” I blurted, and then handed over the best one, the one that had been meant for Mr. Pratt. Patty took it and cradled it in her arms. She smiled big once she had the edge of the covering tin foil pulled up far enough to see what was beneath. She pinched a piece off and took a nibble, and her smile got even bigger.

  I couldn’t leave these people here this way. I couldn’t.

  “Do you know where Sarah’s Eatery is on Main Street?” I asked. Patty nodded and the rest did, too. “I’m the owner.”

  “You’re that lady who killed them two people,” Patty said, her eyes big and innocent. “It’s okay, though. I heard they needed killin’.”

  A squeak escaped me. I gulped hard to get my vocals under control. “You’re welcome to come stay in the café when the cold sets in.” The temperature was due to drop into the single digits in a few days.

  “She wants to kill us, too!” Manny exclaimed.

  “Hush, now,” Winnie chastised him. “If she wanted to kill us, she could poison us with that cake.” She looked at me expectantly.

  Smiling and feeling awkward, I peeled back the aluminum foil for the edge of the cake farthest away from Patty and her coughing. I pinched off a piece, leaned back my head and dropped it in my mouth.

  I froze. Stunned. The cake was good. Really good! I’d baked a good cake!

  Tears flooded my eyes, but I willed them away.

  “See there,” Winnie said, elbowing Manny. “She’s not trying to kill us. If she wanted us dead, all she’d need to do is wait for the weather to do it for her.”

  “Be no satisfaction in letting the weather do it for her,” Manny countered. “Maybe she likes the thrill of doin’ it herself.”

  “Well you can just stay out here and freeze, old man,” Winnie snapped. “I’m gonna go stay at the café.” She gave me a toothy smile, and I felt a lot better about walking away and leaving them there.

  I felt almost human about it.

  When we got in the car, Zoey turned to me. “You sure you know what you’re doing? People like that, they come with baggage. Sometimes dangerous baggage.”

  I nodded, trying to look much more sure of myself than I was. “I’m pretty sure that they saw Mr. Pratt’s murderer.”

  “Why, you seen a mirror around here?”

  “No, not them. I don’t think it was them.”

  “And you’re sure of that? Sure enough to let them come in and spend the night alone with you?”

  “Well, no… There’ll be two locked doors between us. I’ll be upstairs in my apartment.”

  “Because that’s worked out so well for you in the past.”

  I was getting frustrated. “They didn’t do it!” I fell silent, then asked, “So you think he was murdered too, that it wasn’t an accident?”

  Zoey pursed her lips and answered resignedly, “Yeah.”

  “And we’re going to figure out who it was?”

  Zoey gave me her best lopsided grin, all resignation dropping away. “Yeah.”

  A tap sounded at the window, and I nearly jumped so hard that I hit my head on the top of the car. It was Derek.

  Zoey started the engine to power up the car, and I hit the button to roll down the window. I wondered if I had any money in my purse, and was preparing to reach for it in answer to his impending question, when he stopped me dead in my tracks.

  “I seen who did it,” Derek said. “Suze… Susie Q… Susan—something like that. She came running out of Mean Mike’s office when I was coming ‘round the corner from the park.”

  “Susie…” I whispered, not meaning to.

  “Yeah, yeah. The hair lady. That’s her.”

  Chapter 4

  Monday evening came and went. Zoey loaned me a space heater to help me stay warm at night, and I suffered through a very, very cold shower.

  I didn’t see or hear from Susie.

  Tuesday rolled in with me up long before dawn. I baked another mocha chocolate bundt cake. Okay, I baked two, but it only took me the two tries to get it right this time. It was a big hit with the customers, and I charged full price. No Oops board for the bundt!

  I texted Susie. I called Susie. I drove by Susie’s dark and locked up hair salon.

  No Susie.

  Wednesday morning I served breakfast to Brad with the words burning my throat, “Susie killed him!” But despite what homeless Derek saw, I knew it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. Susie was my friend, not a cold-blooded murderer.

  “It was a crime of passion,” Brad said as he scarfed down his scrambled eggs. He’d only found one small piece of eggshell to push to the side.

  Susie could have done a crime of passion. Anybody could do a crime of passion. That’s why they called it a crime of passion. It wasn’t crime of premeditated or crime of strategy. No, it was passion. Passion happened within the moment. It was fueled by emotion.

  I’d never seen Susie as overwrought. I’d never seen her as anyone but unflappable. She was quick with a joke and a smile, and looked for the bright side of every situation. She didn’t seem like a crime of passion type of gal.

  In contrast, Mr. Pratt’s nickname was Mean Mike. Mean Mike. Maybe Mean Mike got a little too mean. Maybe he triggered a rage in Susie that overwhelmed her. Maybe he attacked her and she’d had to defend herself!

  “They found fingerprints all over that shredder,” Brad said. “Fingerprints that weren’t Michael Pratt’s, but they’re not in the national database either.”

  Brad was drunk on good coffee and almost-good eggs. He wasn’t normally so chatty with the specifics of the murders that happened in town, of course he’d had me at the top of the list for those other murders. I figured that he figured I’d had nothing to do with this one.

  “Not in the database? What does that mean?”

  “Means the perp’s got no priors,” Brad said, taking a big bite of toast… or, well, warm bread smeared with butter. It wasn’t very toasty.

  Susie did it! The words flashed in the frontal lobe of my brain like bright neon. I was sure Brad would be able to see it if he looked at me.

  “Have you talked to those homeless people again, the ones that were living in the park next to Mean Mike’s—uh, Mike’s—house?”

  “Mmm, talk to them every day. Seen nothing. Know nothing. Too drunk or high. Unreliable witnesses even if they did know something.”

  Unreliable!

  My brain seized onto that word like a life raft. Susie might not have done it! Derek had said he’d seen Susie there that day, but maybe he’d seen somebody else. Maybe he hadn’t seen anyone at all.

  “I know I shouldn’t be tellin’ you this,” Brad said, leaning forward conspiratorially and dropping his voice even though the only other person in the café was on the far side against the windows and out of earsho
t, “but we got your ex’s high school sweetheart on the hook for the murder. She lawyered up about two seconds into her questioning, though, so no prints from her yet. When we get ‘em, though, I know we’ll have a match.”

  My stomach fell and a flush of fever surged through me. “Susie?”

  Brad stopped eating mid-chew. He swallowed. “You know her?” His tone had changed from conspiratorial to accusatory.

  “Well, yeah. She cut and colored my hair.”

  Brad’s turned red and he jabbed at his eggs. Then, he scooped what was left of his eggs onto his toast and folded it in half before getting up off his stool. “Can’t tell you nothin’. Always sticking your nose right into the middle of somebody’s death. You stay out of this one, Kylie. Stay out of it.”

  He left in a huff, and I resisted throwing the plate out after him. Tomorrow I was going to put extra shell in his eggs.

  The rest of the day ticked by without word from Susie, but Agatha and her knitting club members paid me a visit. They came bearing gifts—or, more precisely, loans. Between the lot of them, they donated sixteen beautiful, hand-knitted afghans of every design imaginable. They were gorgeous. I told them that if any of the ladies wanted to put a for sale tag on their afghans in case any of the customers fell in love with them, I’d be sure to hold onto the proceeds until I saw them again. A couple of the ladies took me up on it. It was the least I could do.

  Wednesday ended in a cold whisper that had me wondering if I’d have any customers on Thursday. I moved my floor mattress into the kitchen, turned on the oven on one side of me and put the plug-in, portable radiator that Zoey had loaned me on the other. With Sage sleeping on top of my head, I actually managed to stay toasty.

  The shower was again brutal. My teeth chattered for twenty minutes afterward. I couldn’t stop trembling. My hair was a disaster and felt coated because I’d spent the bare minimum time possible to wash the shampoo out. Even though I’d recently splurged on buying a towel, I still air dried but I did it sitting right in front of an open oven with the heat cranked up.

  That didn’t last long, though. Worrying about Sage jumping into it and scorching her tiny paws aged me five years before I shut the thing up. In the end, I opted to simply lean my back against the closed oven door. There, I soaked in the radiant heat until it reached my bones.

  Downstairs in the café’s kitchen, I gladly spent the day’s prep time there cooking. I’d looked up a recipe for hearty winter chili. I was tempted to put in extra cayenne pepper but forced myself to stick to the recipe. Even then I got things wrong, but the end result was still surprisingly yummy.

  I decided to serve the chili over baked potatoes. So, I baked a large flat of potatoes, again following a recipe. It was surprisingly hard to find a recipe for simply putting a bunch of potatoes in an oven, and I ended up having to put them back in to cook longer three times before they were done. Only one exploded. I guessed that I’d forgotten to cut it to let it vent.

  Out in the dining area, I added the chili and potato to the Oops board and offered it at a discount. It didn’t belong on the Oops board. The food was good. But the cafe was cold, and the discount was my way of making things up to my customers. I would have offered complimentary coffee, but after switching to an expensive brand, I simply couldn’t afford to.

  Susie walked in the door of the café just as I was putting my latest mocha chocolate bundt cake under a glass dome on the counter across from the grill. Without asking what she needed, I whipped the glass dome back off, cut her a big piece, and then offered the option of cold milk or hot coffee. On the house. Murder suspects whom I believed to be innocent would always eat on the house at my cafe.

  “Coffee,” Susie said, sounding as forlorn and haggard as she looked.

  I poured her a large cup and then set the cream and sugar out next to it. When she didn’t move to finish the coffee off herself, I did it for her, doing my best to duplicate the coffee-cream-brown sugar ratio that I’d seen her use.

  “I told all my customers about your coffee,” Susie said.

  “Have you opened your shop back up yet?” I asked, feeling hopeful. She looked so depressed. But if her shop was open, it was a good sign that she was managing herself okay.

  “No…”

  My hopes were dashed against the rocks and drowned in an icy sea. I pulled my cardigan tighter around me. I had the fireplace in the cozy corner going full tilt. Between the activity and the baking, I’d been comfortable enough prior to Susie coming in, but she brought a hopelessness with her that sucked all the warmth away.

  No other customers were in yet, and Brenda hadn’t left. I told Brenda to take care of any customers who came in—which she grumbled about—and I marched Susie back to the cozy corner and sat her down into the snuggliest chair. Next came a white afghan decorated with giant yellow daisies. I put the chocolate cake and coffee next to her and ordered, “Eat.”

  She did eat, lifelessly at first. Then she drank her coffee. Then she ate some more cake. The color slowly returned to her cheeks. She no longer blinked in slow motion. And without even seeming to move, she sat up taller. She was back.

  “The police think I did it,” Susie finally said.

  Been there. Done that. Zoey and I had both stared down that particular barrel of a gun—sometimes literally.

  “What makes them think it was a murder and not an accident?” I know that Derek had called it murder, but if he didn’t do it and didn’t see it, there was a chance it could have been an accident instead.

  “I don’t know. Nobody would tell me anything.”

  “Did you do it?” It was a question that had to be asked.

  Susie’s eyes welled with tears and she shook her head no. “I let them take my fingerprints yesterday. They’re going to find my fingerprints all over that shredder that killed Mr. Pratt. But I didn’t do it. I went into his office, saw him, ran over and tried to pull the shredder off of him. It was right up against his face. It was terrible! I tried to get it off, but it wouldn’t budge. That’s when I realized they were locked together. I ran after out after that. Ran as fast as I could. Mr. Pratt was dead. Really dead. Like… I don’t know, dead. No CPR will do kind of dead. I’ve never seen anything like that before. He wet himself, did you know that?”

  I shook my head.

  “It wasn’t like what you see on the TV.” Susie seemed to shrink into herself again, growing pale, and I nudged her cup of coffee a little closer to her. She drank and seemed to recover. She took a deep breath. Without looking at me, she revealed the thing that seemed to be sitting on her the heaviest. “I had a fight with Mr. Pratt earlier in the day. When I found him, that was the second time I’d been there.” She looked at me. “I was so mad, Kylie. I was yelling. I called him names. I told him that I wouldn’t let him get away with it. He was trying to ruin me on purpose, Kylie. I figured it out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’d found out my business was doing better, that business was picking up, and that’s why he raised the rent. He said he didn’t like his tenants to get too far above themselves, liked to remind them who they were, keep ‘em down and struggling.”

  My mouth fell open. “He said that?”

  Susie hedged, rocking her head from side to side. “Not in those words, but that was the message. Kylie, I’d never been so mad in my life. I was seeing red. When I left, if I’d had a gun, I might have used it. If I’d have had anything—a crowbar—I would have busted his office to pieces.”

  “Why’d you go back?”

  Susie repositioned herself in the overstuffed chair. She looked more energized, empowered even. “I went back to his office to tell him that he wasn’t going to get one more red cent out of me. Not one. He could go ahead and sue. He could do whatever he wanted. And, if he won the lawsuit, I’d file for bankruptcy so that he still wouldn’t get anything. I’d make sure that everything I had went to cover lawyer’s fees and that there’d be nothing left to pay him.”

  “Wow�
�” What she was talking about was hardcore. She’d been ready to turn her entire world upside down and rip it apart rather than give Mr. Pratt any more money. Sadly, that wasn’t doing anything to convince me that she wasn’t the murderer. If anything, I was seeing some of that passion that Brad had been talking about. But was it a killing passion?

  Susie nodded. “Yeah. Wow. My sweetheart, Sam, asked me to move in with him. Well, first he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him, but I told him that I didn’t want to bring my legal problems onto him. So then he asked me to move in with him. He said he’d build me my own private salon space in the house, with its own garden-level entrance and everything. He’s a carpenter, so he can do that kind of thing. He described it all, said he’d do anything for me, and that he loved me.”

  Tears were in Susie’s eyes, but I was still stuck on her saying that Sam would do anything for her. I’d seen his picture when Susie had cut and colored my hair. He was a big guy. A strong guy. Strong enough to hold Mike Pratt down while the shredder choked the life out of him by eating his scarf.

  I had a new suspect.

  “He said he didn’t want to be without me, said he’d been planning to ask me to marry him in another month after he got the ring but that he saw no reason to wait. He’d been planning on building me that salon all along. Said he was grateful to Mr. Pratt ‘cause it gave me a little more incentive to say yes.” Susie laughed with tearful joy. “The silly fool. I’d have said yes anyway.”

  Maybe I didn’t have a new suspect. Then again, sounded like Sam had been ready to shake Mike’s dead hand. But, if the threat of a lawsuit was getting in the way of their impending nuptials, maybe Sam would see to Mike’s end after all.

  The mental tennis match of lobbing Sam back and forth as a suspect in my head was giving me a headache. I decided to put a pin in the idea and circle back to it if we ran into a dead end.

  Susie reached out a hand and touched mine, pulling me back into the moment. “I don’t want you investigating this, hun,” she said.

  “Huh?” I hadn’t seen that coming.