Chili Con Carnage (A Chili Cook-Off Mystery)

by Logan, Kylie

  “So what’s the drug?”

  “Alphonse seems like an okay kind of guy to me,” Nick said, which didn’t sound like an answer to my question. “I’d hate to see him get dragged into this and get embarrassed in public.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “Because it was . . .” Nick mumbled something under his breath, something I only caught the last little bit of.

  “You mean the little blue pills?” The words burst out of me. “The ones guys use when—”

  “That’s right.”

  “And Roberto was making fake ones?”

  “Counterfeit prescription medications are a huge problem around the world. It’s something like a seventy-five-billion-dollar business.”

  “And Roberto was part of it.” It made sense. “That’s what he was manufacturing, and that’s what he sold to Puff, but he kept some for himself, and he sold a few pills to Alphonse, and Alphonse, he figured out they weren’t the real thing when . . .”

  Nick looked at me hard. “I think we can both imagine that scene.”

  We could.

  I couldn’t decide whether to burst out laughing or to take pity on Alphonse. That didn’t keep me from grinning all the way back to the Palace.

  CHAPTER 16

  “You’re not packing up.” Tumbleweed and Ruth Ann walked by holding hands, and stopped long enough to peek into the Palace where I was sitting with my butt on one high stool and my feet on another. I was finishing up a bowl of the chili I’d made earlier that Sunday morning. “We’re leaving bright and early,” Tumbleweed reminded me. “Got to clear out of the fairgrounds before the next show moves in.”

  “Except I’m not. Clearing out, that is.” I swallowed down the last of the chili and congratulated myself. It wasn’t as good as Jack’s—nothing was—but it wasn’t half bad. Especially since I’d sprinkled chopped jalepeño on top of the chili and added a big, fat dollop of guacamole. I’d gotten some salsa and chips from one of my neighboring vendors to go along with the chili, and I brushed crumbs off the front of my shirt. “I’ve got to stay around, Tumbleweed.”

  Ruth Ann poked him. “Told you so. Told you she wasn’t going to leave Sylvia high and dry.”

  Tumbleweed tugged on one earlobe. “I suppose I should have expected it. As much as you two like to fight, you really do love each other.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.” I felt morally obligated to mention this, especially since I didn’t want word to get around the Showdown that I’d gotten soft, or worse, that Sylvia and I were BFFs thanks to the little matter of somebody plunging a knife through Roberto’s heart. I swung off the stool, and since I’d been smart enough to eat my chili out of a paper bowl, I threw it away instead of having to wash it. “But I can’t exactly head for Vegas with the rest of you. At least not until after Sylvia gets arraigned tomorrow. After that . . .” Truth be told, after that, I wasn’t exactly sure what was going to happen and the thought scared the bejeebers out of me. Was it possible that Sylvia actually might be found guilty of the murder? Founded guilty and tossed in prison?

  Just thinking about it froze my insides, which had been feeling nice and warm and full from the chili. Of course, I couldn’t let on. Not to Tumbleweed and Ruth Ann. If they knew how worried I really was, they’d never leave Taos.

  “You know we’d like to stay with you.” Ruth Ann must have been reading my mind. “But we’ve got to be in Vegas bright and early Wednesday. I already put an ad in the local paper there to interview for day help, and we can’t have folks showing up and have nobody there. We’ve been talking about it . . .” She glanced at her husband. Yeah, as if that we could have been anybody but her and Tumbleweed. “We just hate leaving you here, honey.”

  I didn’t doubt it for a second.

  “Sylvia and I will be fine,” I assured Ruth Ann. “Guaranteed, the judge is going to know right away that Sylvia had nothing to do with Puff’s death. She was in jail, she couldn’t have killed Puff. Maybe that will convince him Sylvia couldn’t have had anything to do with Roberto’s murder, either.”

  “Maybe.” Both Tumbleweed and Ruth Ann spoke at the same time, and I might have been a little more confident if either one of them had bothered to sound the least bit sure of themselves.

  “Oh come on!” I looked from one of them to the other. “You don’t think—”

  Ruth Ann reached across the counter and patted my hand. “I think you’re the best sister Sylvia could ever have,” she said.

  “Half—”

  Tumbleweed squeezed my other hand. “She’s lucky to have you. And you . . .” Like he always did when the Showdown wrapped up and it was time to move on to the next town, he was carrying a stack of flyers that included a map that showed where we were headed and where we could park when we got there. He peeled one off, set it down on the counter in front of me, and tapped the map with one finger. “You’re going to meet up with us, right? You and Sylvia. I want the both of you girls there.”

  I said we wouldn’t miss it for the world, and promised we’d be there as soon as possible, and when Tumbleweed and Ruth Ann moved on to the next vendor to hand out their flyers, I flopped back down on the stool. Truth of the matter is, I would have felt a lot better about lying to Tumbleweed and Ruth Ann about how confident I felt if I felt the least bit confident.

  I also would have felt a whole lot better if I had the answers to the questions that kept battering around inside my head.

  Did Puff really kill Roberto?

  And was it because they were conspirators in some shady business that distributed fake little blue pills to guys desperate for some bedtime action?

  So why did somebody kill Puff?

  Frustrated and feeling completely out of my league, I scrubbed my hands over my face, and reminded myself that I’d gotten this far. I could take the next step. Honest, I could.

  If only I could figure out what that next step was.

  No sooner had the thought popped into my head than I heard Ruth Ann’s voice float to me from the booth next door.

  “. . . she’s such a good sister,” Ruth Ann said. “So devoted. She’d never leave Sylvia. Blood is thicker than water. That’s what they say, you know, and our Maxie, she’s living proof. Blood is thicker than water.”

  Hmmm . . .

  It was one of those old sayings that I’d heard so many times, I’d never really stopped to think about it. But I guess it was true. Even half blood made people do stupid things. Look how I was sticking my neck out for Sylvia. Like it or not, Sylvia and I were tied together by Jack. That meant that no matter how rotten, nasty, and mean-spirited she was—I set the thought aside, because the whole blood-is-thicker-than-water thing meant something else, too.

  I slid off the stool, locked up the Palace behind me, and headed to Gert’s.

  • • •

  “So I figured you could use the help. I mean, what with me not leaving for a couple days. I’m in no hurry to get the Palace packed up.”

  “That’s so sweet of you!” Gert folded dish towels and laid them carefully in the big plastic containers she used to transport them. “If you just want to grab that other container over there . . .” She pointed.

  I went and retrieved the tub, and while she worked on the dish towels, I started in on the aprons on the other side of the rack.

  The first batch of them was bright red with the words Some Like it Hot embroidered across the front. I scooped them off the rack, set them on a nearby chair, and got to work. It took me a couple minutes, but I eventually got a folding routine down: bib under skirt, ties behind bib, skirt of the apron folded around it all, then folded again.

  I set the first apron in the open tub. “So what do you think?” I looked at Gert through the wire folding rack that separated us. It was about six feet high, taller than both of us, but I could see her through the slats. “About poor Puff.”

  She bent over to set a pile of towels in her tub, so I couldn’t see her face, but I heard her click her tongue. “Poor Puff i
s right. Do you think . . .” She peeked around the corner of the rack. “People are saying he was involved in something he shouldn’t have been involved in. That’s why he got himself killed. Do you think it’s true?”

  “Can’t say.” I couldn’t, so it wasn’t exactly a lie. Nick had asked me to keep my mouth shut about our theories regarding Roberto’s and Puff’s murders. About the video and the little blue pills. But keeping my mouth shut didn’t mean not asking questions, right?

  I kept on asking questions.

  “Do you think it’s true?” I asked Gert.

  “Well, it would seem just too horrible otherwise, wouldn’t it? I mean . . .” She ducked back behind the rack and continued to strip towels off it, fold them, and stow them away, and with each row she peeled away, I could see a little more of Gert in her ankle-length red skirt, her white shirt, and her turquoise earrings and silver-and-turquoise squash blossom necklace.

  “It’s terrible either way, of course,” she said. “But somehow, if Puff was completely innocent and someone did this awful thing to him . . . well, that’s just too horrible to think about. If that could happen to an innocent person, then it could happen to any one of us, and, of course, that’s a frightening thought. But if Puff was involved in something illegal . . . well, it’s still awful, don’t get me wrong. But it means he put himself in danger. That he made the choice, and his death wasn’t random. It’s still vicious. And evil. But it’s not random, and in the great scheme of things, I guess there’s an odd comfort in that.”

  “And which do you think it is? Random? Or he had it coming?”

  I saw her shoot me the pointed look I deserved for the had-it-coming comment. “Can’t say. Don’t know. I’m not familiar with all the players around here, not like you are. You don’t think . . .” I watched her hands still over a towel, mid-fold. “You don’t think someone around here could be that wicked, do you?”

  I shrugged even though I knew she wouldn’t see it. “Depends. I guess it would make more sense if someone had a motive. You know, a really good motive. Like they were getting revenge because someone hurt somebody they loved.”

  Even from where I was standing, I could see that Gert’s tub wasn’t full, but she stopped putting towels into it and covered it up. She went to the other side of the tent, grabbed another tub, and dragged it over.

  Through the rack, I saw her level a look at me. “You don’t think I killed Puff, do you?”

  “I don’t. Not really.”

  “But not really doesn’t mean absolutely.” Somehow, she didn’t seem to hold this against me. She grabbed a handful of yellow towels with smiley faces on them made of different types of peppers and got to work on those.

  “I have to ask,” I said. “I figured you’d understand. You know, because blood is thicker than water.”

  “And Sylvia’s still sitting in jail.” Gert wasn’t done, but I saw her brush her hands together as if to say enough was enough. She walked to the back of the tent and sat down in one of the chairs where we’d had our heart-to-heart—and that really nasty tea—just a couple days before. It seemed like a lifetime ago. I guess for Roberto and Puff, it was.

  I finished the red aprons before I joined her.

  “Just the other day, you thought I killed Robert because I hated him.” Three cheers for Gert, she didn’t beat around the bush. She didn’t seem to hold a grudge, either. She said this as if we were nothing more than friends, just sitting and chatting and not talking about knives and fires and murder. “Now you think there’s some connection between Robert’s death and Puff’s, and that I killed Puff because I loved Robert very much.”

  “I think Puff killed Roberto.” This didn’t exactly violate Nick’s rule about keeping my mouth shut, because for all Gert knew, I was just sitting around thinking and I’d come up with this theory on my own. I didn’t say that there was actually proof, like Puff calling Roberto’s phone, and Puff in Roberto’s apartment and, oh yeah, that damning video. “So naturally I thought that someone who loved Roberto might—”

  “I guess that lets me off the hook.” Gert laughed, but not like it was funny, more like it was uncomfortable to say and the only way to make the words come out was to pretend they were part of a joke. “Yeah, he was family, but as I told you before, Maxie, I could never forgive Robert for what he put my sister through. All the pain, all the suffering . . . he didn’t deserve to die the way he did, but . . .” When she sighed, her shoulders rose and fell and for a couple minutes, we sat in silence.

  “I wasn’t exactly completely honest with you last time you were here to talk to me,” she finally said. “Oh, I didn’t lie. Don’t get that impression.” Gert glanced away. “But I may have left out a few pertinent details.”

  “About Roberto.”

  She nodded. “I told you what he was like, what he was always like. Robert Lasky was a lazy, dishonest boy, and he grew up to be a lazy, dishonest man. When he showed up here in Taos, I was ready to toss him out on his keister, but he told me . . .” Though her expression was calm, her hands worked over each other, like she was knitting an invisible scarf. “He admitted that he was involved in some things that weren’t exactly on the up-and-up.”

  My turn to nod. “Drugs.”

  Gert’s gaze shot to mine. “You know that! How?”

  I remembered my promise to Nick and toed the edge of saying too much and not saying enough to get a response out of Gert. “It’s kind of a long story,” I explained. “And it really doesn’t matter. He was manufacturing those little blue pills. You know, for erectile dysfunction.”

  She spit out a laugh. “Is that what it was? He never said. He only told me he’d gotten involved in manufacturing something and that it was illegal. I didn’t question either. Robert was a brilliant chemist, so him being on the manufacturing end, that made sense. As for the illegal . . .” She gave a sort of whatever shrug, but hey, I’d used the gesture before myself a million times, and I knew it covered a multitude of emotions. “Like I said, lazy and dishonest. He did say he was making a lot of money doing whatever it was he was doing, and that’s where I stopped asking questions. I figured I didn’t want to know any more than that. He also confessed . . .” She didn’t much like Robert, and I couldn’t blame her. But Gert had a conscience, and she was still ashamed on his behalf. “He said he mixed together things like wallboard and paste to make pills that looked just right and that they were selling for a fraction of what the real things cost and people never knew the difference. I was appalled, and I told him so. I begged him to get away from that life, but he said I shouldn’t worry, he already had.”

  Gert steepled her fingers and tapped her chin. “Sounds good, doesn’t it? He’d seen the light, and turned away from a life of crime. But remember what I said about Robert. Lazy as the day is long and as dishonest as any man who ever walked the Earth. Turns out the reason he walked away from his profitable little drug venture was because he tried to shake down whoever was above him in the drug hierarchy. Robert wanted a bigger piece of the profit pie, and when he didn’t get it, he opened his big mouth and said he’d go to the cops and bring down the whole enterprise. Needless to say, there were some people who were pretty angry, and they swore they’d come after him.”

  “Which is why he was hiding out here at the Showdown and why he changed his name.”

  Gert didn’t confirm or deny. She didn’t have to. “He’d taken a lot of money with him, but of course, he was blowing through that pretty fast. Robert always loved the good life! So that’s why he was laying low, and that’s why he was working as a roadie. He figured if he was traveling, he’d always be one step ahead of the guys who were looking for him.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer, because I hated to have my theory about Puff as murderer shot all to hell, but I had to ask. “Do you think they might have killed him?”

  “He claimed he was safe. He claimed they didn’t know where he was. But if someone else involved in the enterprise did . . .”

/>   She didn’t have to say it, she was thinking about Puff, just like I was.

  “Which gets us right back to where we started,” I pointed out. “If Puff killed your nephew . . .”

  “Then I might have killed Puff. For revenge. Only I didn’t.” She slid me a look. “I couldn’t have. I wasn’t here last night.”

  On the cop shows on TV, they would call this an alibi and head off to investigate whether it was true or not. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to, I just wasn’t sure where to begin. Except at the source.

  “Where were you?” I asked Gert.

  “That . . .” She gave my knee a sharp, friendly slap and stood. “That’s something I can’t tell you.”

  It’s not like I had any authority, I mean, not like the cops would if they asked the same question. That didn’t keep me from giving it my best shot. I followed her over to the dish towel rack. “If the cops can’t confirm your alibi, it’s going to make you look guilty.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve talked to the police. They know my connection to Robert and they don’t think a thing of it.”

  “But if they should come around and ask about last night—”

  “Then I’ll tell them.”

  “But when I asked—”

  “I told you, Maxie, that’s something I can’t tell you.”

  It took me a couple minutes to chew over this tangled train of thought, and when I was done, I was no closer to working it out. “You can tell the cops, but you can’t tell me.”

  Gert folded a dishtowel. “That’s right.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  She set the towel in the tub. “Because I promised I wouldn’t.”

  “You promised—” In a whoosh that sounded like a balloon getting punctured, the air rushed out of my lungs. “Jack!”

  Gert set another towel in the tub. “I can’t say.”

  “But Gert . . .” I stood on the other side of the tub from her, and because she was acting like it was no big deal and I knew different, I gave the tub a little kick to get her attention. “If you know where he is, if you know what’s going on—”