A Berry Clever Corpse

by WINTERS, A. R.

  While Zoey and Grace got us seats at a table overlooking a large pond with a water spouting fountain at its center, I got coffee and chocolate chocolate-chip muffins for everyone. I was afraid that Zoey would be in the process of disemboweling Grace for information by the time I reached the table, but, in rare form, Zoey was sitting quietly and she and Grace were looking out over the pond, watching the spray from the spouting fountain dance across the water’s surface.

  Sitting down at a table where no one was talking felt more odd than sitting down at a table mid-conversation. It was awkward. The silence felt pregnant. Finally, Grace pulled her attention away from the pond and looked at me.

  “You’re trying to figure out who killed Mike, aren’t you?” she said.

  Zoey and I looked at each other.

  “I know about you two. Heard about you. My brother went to school with that guy who everybody said you killed,” she said, looking at Zoey. “He said you two figured out the truth.” Then she looked at me. “And my mom goes to church with your Aunt Dorothy.”

  “Ex-aunt,” I said, the words coming out of my mouth all on their own.

  “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “None of it’s true. I swear,” I said. My ex-aunt Dorothy hated me. When I first took over the café, she told everyone that I’d kill people with my food. Then, of course, somebody ate my food and died. So, yeah, they weren’t good times.

  “I was hoping that it was all true.” She leaned forward onto her elbows. The exhaustion I saw in her eyes made me want to make up a pallet on the floor right then and there and watch over it as she took a nap. “Somebody killed Mike. They stole years away from his life, and I want to know who it was.”

  “How long was Mike your boyfriend?” I asked. I had no idea if he was, but Grace was the first person we’d met who seemed to have been affected by his death.

  “A few years.”

  Bingo! Except Mike was a horndog. He tried to extort women for sex. If they were nice to him, he’d be nice about their rent. It was the type of information that could totally shut down this conversation…

  “We had an open relationship.”

  Or maybe not.

  “And before you ask, I was here all day the day Mike died. All day. You can ask my boss. You can ask anyone I work with. I didn’t kill Mike, but I want to know who did.”

  Grace was a beautiful woman full of youth. Mike had been an out of shape old geezer by comparison—an old geezer whom she knew slept with whatever skirt he could catch.

  “If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, “why were you with Mike?”

  “Money.”

  Her face didn’t flinch. I didn’t even see any shame.

  She shrugged. “I like nice things. He could give me nice things. He liked pretty women. I’m a pretty woman. We knew who we were to each other and we were fine with it. We were more than fine with it. We were happy. We saw each other when we wanted to see each other. I never put any pressure on him about who we were to each other, never asked for a commitment, and he never tried to tell me how to live my life. All those other idiot women, I’d hear about how they’d try to play him, how they’d try to manipulate him. They always wanted. Always tried to trick him, so he got off on tricking them instead.”

  I was a bit surprised at the words that were coming out of her mouth. So young, but so jaded. I’d never been a huge sisterhood solidarity type of person, putting women before any man ever, but I did feel compassion for the many women who had been messed over by a man in some way or other.

  Zoey shifted in her chair. “Did any of the women he tricked want to hurt Mike?”

  “All of them,” Grace scoffed. “But none of them had a use for Mike six feet in the ground. They all wanted what he could do for them while he was alive. So I don’t get it. I don’t get why one of them would kill him.”

  “But you’re convinced that it was a woman?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “No blood. Guys, they want to know they’ve been there. They want to leave a mark. Whoever killed Mike, they let that stupid machine of his do all the work.”

  That made sense. When I thought of murder by men, I did tend to picture an end that required a blood splatter analysis afterward. Women didn’t seem as interested in making a mess.

  I leaned onto my elbows, mirroring Grace. “Who do you think did it?”

  “Well, not Susie,” Grace said with open derision. “I’ve talked to the police five different times now. Five. They haven’t told me who they think did it, haven’t named names, but every question they ask tracks back to Susie. They’re building a case instead of solving it.”

  Holy cow. Someone who knew Mike and didn’t think that Susie had killed him.

  “Why don’t you think it was Susie?” I asked, feeling way too eager for her answer.

  “She’s too much of a wimp.”

  Not a flattering answer, but it at least it was an argument toward Susie’s defense.

  Zoey sat back and crossed her arms. “Yeah, I’m not buying it. Wimps explode when pushed too far. Calling Susie a wimp doesn’t prove anything.”

  I felt like kicking Zoey under the table. We’d finally found someone willing to entertain the idea that Susie was innocent. But Zoey had a point. The defense of “she’s a wimp” wasn’t going to stand up in any court of law.

  “You got anything else?” I asked Grace. “Anything you could tell us about the other women in Mike’s life?”

  “Betty wanted to marry him and—”

  “Wait. What? She what?” I asked, thankful that I was already sitting down.

  “Yeah. Mike would laugh about it. He’d talk about how she’d drop hints left and right about him needing to buy her an engagement ring. She was picking out places for them to go on a honeymoon, and she’d ask questions about people like she was putting together a guest list. She was nuts—but he thought it was cute.”

  My stomach turned upside down. Mike had thought Betty wanting to marry him was “cute.”

  “How long had this cuteness been going on?” Zoey asked.

  Grace shrugged. “Six, seven months?”

  My head was spinning, but Grace was such a well of information. I had to hold it together. “Had he done anything to make her think that they would be getting married?”

  Grace shrugged again. “I don’t know. Maybe. She was so eager. She doted on him. Baked for him, cleaned his house, did anything he asked. He liked it… but he was going to end it.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “She got possessive. Started wanting him to account for his time. Started making demands. It became not fun for him anymore, so he was going to end it.”

  Not fun… I hoped that Mike was rotting in his grave.

  “Was he seeing any other women while he and Betty were a couple?” Zoey asked.

  “Other than me? Sure. Lots. Sometimes they were just flings for a weekend. Sometimes a couple of weeks. I think that the only reason he stayed with Betty so long was that she was a great cook. She’d make homemade meals for him. Brought a girl’s touch to his house. He said she made it feel more like a home. But… she was kind of like a vacation for him. I knew it would never last.”

  “Do you know if he’d broken up with Betty already before the time of his death?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you think that Betty killed him?”

  “No, I think it was Clara.”

  Yes! My ego led an instant and silent little cheer, and I realized that I needed to do a lot of self-checking later about my jealousy over her success with her coffee shop.

  “Why Clara?” Zoey asked.

  “Mike had been trying to get her into bed for forever, but she’d been smart about it. She wanted a new contract, one that locked in her rent rates for half of what she was paying. He told me that he’d finally had a contract drawn up but that he’d had a clause built into it that would nullify and void the contract e
ven after it had been signed. He planned to sleep with her and then legally revert back to the original contract.”

  “Do you know if he’d gone through with it by the time of his death?”

  “I think so. He didn’t say so directly, but I know that he’d planned to do it soon. So I think he slept with her, then told her that the new contract was worthless, and she killed him.”

  That would make me want to kill him.

  “What about loony-toons next door?” Zoey asked.

  “Tina? Yeah, she’s psycho.”

  “But you don’t think it was her?” I asked.

  “Tina and Mike had a thing several years back, before my time. She’d been all up in his stuff ever since I’d known him. Unhinged. Crazy. Obsessive. She is not right in the head. But that’s the way it’s always been. She’s always been like that. What could have made her go from being the crazy psycho lady to being the crazy killer lady after all that time? And there wasn’t anything in it for her to kill Mike.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “If she killed Mike, who would she have to obsess over and throw all her hate at?”

  Grace had a point.

  Zoey tapped the table top with one nail-bitten finger. “What if Betty got even more ahead of herself and let slip to Tina that she and Mike were going to get married?”

  “Ohhhh,” Grace said. “Ohhhh, yeah. Tina’s head would have exploded at the thought of Mike having a happily ever after. If she thought that Mike was in love and happy…” She shook her head. “I don’t think that Tina could have lived with that. Her whole purpose in life was trying to create misery in his.”

  I couldn’t imagine letting hate so fully consume everything good about my life. “Why’d she hate him so much?”

  Grace shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think Mike knew. I think their fling only lasted a month and a half. But… they had been flirting for close to a year. He’d said that there’d been a lot of build up before they got into it. Then they got into it and things were off the hook intense, but by the time they came up for air, he’d gotten all he wanted. Dropped her cold turkey.”

  “And this happened…?”

  “A few years back. Not recent,” Grace said.

  “So,” Zoey said, “Tina gets her jollies hating on Mike. Betty tells Tina that she and Mike are heading for a happily ever after. That sends Tina off the deep end, and she kills Mike.”

  “That’s what happened, it’s got to be,” Grace said. “Tina killed Mike.”

  But that left some seriously unanswered questions about Clara…

  Chapter 28

  What’s the plan?” I asked. We were back in our spot across the road from Tina’s house. The light outside was failing, and I was worried about whether or not the chili and baked potatoes prepared for lunch would last to cover all of the dinner customers, however few there would be.

  “We go up and knock on Tina’s door. If she answers, we press her until she confesses to Mike’s murder. If she doesn’t answer, we find a way in and search her house.”

  “For what? Mike was killed with his own shredder and his own scarf. What evidence could she have stashed away?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she’s got one of those love-you-to-death shrines in her house.”

  “A what shrine?”

  “You know, some closet or room where she’s pasted pictures of him all over her wall and scratched out his eyes and stuff like that.”

  “Eww, that’s sick,” I said, picturing all the imaginary carnage.

  “Of course it’s sick. Look who we’re talking about.”

  “Shut. The. Front. Door.”

  “Yeah, we’ll shut the front.”

  “No, no… Look! Tina’s shutting the front door!” Zoey snapped her head around to look at Tina’s front door. “No! Mike’s front door! Tina’s coming out of Mike’s house!”

  As we watched, Tina balanced a load of items in her arms while picking up a rock, doing something to the bottom of it. She then tossed it into the bushes to the side of the door.

  “A hide-a-key rock,” Zoey said.

  We watched Tina look up and down the street before cutting across Mike’s yard toward her own.

  Zoey and I got out of her car, and Tina spotted us when I closed my car door too hard. She froze, then she ran. Zoey and I burst into a hard sprint. All three of us were aiming for Tina’s front door.

  Tina jumped the low hedges separating her yard from Mike’s. Zoey and I burst through a line of young rose bushes. Tina reached her door first, but then fumbled trying to get it open because of all the stuff in her arms. It slowed her down just enough for Zoey to pull Tina back by the collar of her shirt before wedging herself in-between Tina and the front door.

  I was very embarrassingly huffing by the time I reached the door. Zoey and Tina weren’t winded at all. I really needed to start fitting in some cardio into my day.

  Zoey shot the first question at Tina. “Why’d you try to break into Kylie’s apartment?”

  “No, I didn’t. Why would I?” Tina was more wild-eyed than usual. It made me concerned that we didn’t have something like a netted fish scoop on hand to pick them up if they popped out of her head.

  “What were you doing in Mike’s house?” I said.

  “I wasn’t in his house. I was just coming home. I just got here.”

  The lie was so blatant. It was an attempt to completely rewrite history. Too bad her car was nowhere in sight.

  “Isn’t your car parked in your garage?” I asked. “Don’t you have a door leading from your garage into your house? Why would you be out in your yard, going through your front door with a… a”—I took a quick inventory of the items in her arms—“stapler? And what is that, a man’s hairbrush? What about that shaving kit?”

  “Shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I just got home.”

  “Tina!” I knew that it was her word against ours, but we did at least have some physical evidence on our side that I was sure could be IDed as belonging to Mike if we tried hard enough. “We saw you come out of Mike’s house. Zoey’s got video of it on her phone!” It was an outright lie, but it would hopefully move us past Tina’s outright lie.

  Tina looked back and forth between me and Zoey. She looked like she was watching a tennis match played at hyper speed, then the unthinkable happened. Her huge bulging eyes squeezed shut and she burst out into tears. “I just wanted a memento,” she sobbed. “He was mine. I loved him. Nobody understood us. Nobody understood what we had. I just wanted something of his that I could hold onto.”

  I looked at what she’d chosen again. I could understand the hairbrush and the shaving kit. Those two were very personal items, but the stapler did fit in. It was a stapler. Completely non-personal. Meaningless.

  “You killed him with the stapler, did you?” I blurted.

  “No. What are you saying? He choked.”

  “But he could have gotten away, couldn’t he? He could have gotten himself loose. But you were there, and you hit him on the back of his head with that stapler, didn’t you!”

  “No!”

  “Admit it! You found out that he and Betty were getting married—”

  “What?!” Tina’s screech was so loud and so shrill that I was shocked that I wasn’t hearing the sound of glass break all up and down the street.

  Tina’s cradling arms dropped their precious cargo and her stolen items fell to the concrete stoop with a clatter. Then she pushed me. Hard. I’d been completely unprepared for her reaction, and I ended up flat on my back several feet away.

  I was also not prepared for what happened after that. Tina screamed “Take it back!” and then leaped through the air like Spiderman to land straddling my chest with her knees pinning down my arms.

  “Take it back!” she screamed again as her hands clamped themselves around my neck with the strength of a steel vice. I thrashed beneath her, but I couldn’t get my arms loose to defend myself at all.

  Z
oey looped an arm around Tina’s waist and lifted her off. Even then, Tina kept her hold on my neck. With me prying her hands loose and Zoey pulling her, I finally broke free and Zoey flung Tina into the middle of her yard.

  Tina turned the momentum into a gymnast’s tumble and landed in complete control of her body. On all fours, in a position poised to launch her forward in another attack, she screamed, “Take it back! He was mine! He was coming back to me!”

  Zoey and I inched ourselves closer together. Strength in numbers.

  “Just a guess,” I said, “but I think that this might be the first time she’s hearing about any wedding plans.”

  “I agree. She would have definitely left blood splatter.”

  I imagined Tina hitting Mike with the stapler. Then I imagined her hitting him a few hundred more times with the stapler.

  Yep, definitely blood splatter.

  “Race you to the car?” I asked.

  “No, walk with arms linked. She’ll want to separate us to take us down one at a time. Rip our throats out or something.”

  The day had almost fully turned into night, but I was pretty sure that I could see some foamy spittle on Tina’s mouth. Deranged didn’t even begin to describe her at that moment.

  “Yep,” I said. “Strength in numbers. Let’s do this.”

  Chapter 29

  Making it back to Zoey’s car had been like trying to maneuver past a rabid dog. Don’t move too fast, don’t move too slow. We locked the doors the second we got inside, and Zoey was driving as soon as the car slipped into gear.

  “Where to next?” Zoey asked once Tina was out of sight. “Betty’s salon?”

  “The café. I’ve got to get back,” I said, looking at my phone with still shaking hands. I’d gotten a text from Melanie. “The chili’s almost gone, and they don’t have anything to serve for dinner.”

  Zoey parked behind the café so that I could get inside and get to work that much quicker. I entered through the back into the kitchen, grabbed an apron, threw it on, and then went out to the Oops Board. I’d made enough steak hoagies as practice. Now it was time to offer an actual steak dinner. I scrawled the menu onto the board: sirloin, steak fries, caramelized onions, and grilled plum tomatoes with blue cheese crumble. I was going bold.