“So the two of you broke up?” Zoey asked.
“I broke up with him,” Patty said, lifting her chin, but then she seemed to deflate. “I was going to break up with him. When he realized I’d found out he was cheating on me with Marla, he beat me to it and broke up with me first.” There was a lot of bitterness in her voice. “With a text.”
Ouch.
“How long had you been together?” I asked.
“Two and a half stinking years.” She crossed her arms. “I kept waiting for him to propose… every birthday, every Christmas and Valentine’s Day. He kept telling me he wanted to marry me. ‘When the time was right,’ he’d say.” Her gaze flicked between Zoey and me. “I heard he bought that skank Marla an engagement ring after two and a half months. I’d like to rip her hair out.”
All right then. Lots of anger to go with the bitterness.
“And maybe choke the life out of him, too?” I’d said it with a joking voice, hoping to sneak it past her defenses. It didn’t work.
“The man is dead!” she rebuked at the same time as she lamented.
“But what I need to know is did you kill him?” I blinked, stunned with myself. Those words did not just come out of my mouth. Tell me I didn’t say them.
Patty stepped forward. She didn’t as sweet and nice as she had when we’d first walked up. “If I’d have killed him, I’d have done it with the bottle of poison that I’ve got sitting at home.”
Neither Zoey nor I said anything in response to her oath. The silence that lingered must have given Patty time to come to her senses because her eyes went wide and her hands flew up to cover her mouth.
Without saying anything more, she turned to go but I grabbed her good arm before she could disappear through the door.
“Where were you the night that Cam died?”
“At Madame X’s, getting drunk with some friends.” She jerked loose and was gone.
Back in the car, I asked, “Do you think she did it?”
“Maybe.” Zoey’s attention was on her tablet as she scoured various social media sites. It didn’t take her long to find something of interest. “Check it out.” She handed over the tablet. On it was a picture of Patty with some all-female friends at a bar. I assumed it was Madame X’s. Above the line of party-happy girls was a banner that read, “Good Riddance Cam.”
“Where to next?” Zoey asked.
Staring at the picture, I said, “Madame X’s.”
Chapter 19
It was heading into late afternoon but not quite early evening when we reached Madame X’s. The parking lot was empty, and the neon sign outside displaying the club’s name was not yet turned on. It felt odd walking from daylight into the dimly lit innards of the almost empty club.
A few daytime drinkers were perched at the bar. No one sat within easy speaking distance of anyone else. These people wanted to be alone. In stark contrast to the miasma of their quiet despair, the bartender looked energized and full of the vigor of youth. He wore a white blousy shirt that would have been at home on a swashbuckling pirate, and he made it look every bit as sexy as you would hope a strikingly confident pirate would.
Zoey and I claimed the spot at the end of the bar and sat on the tall, dark forest green faux-leather covered stools.
The dark-haired bartender came over. He leaned into his hands, perched against the bar from his side and gave Zoey a wink before asking, “What can I get you ladies?”
Zoey didn’t hesitate. “A soda with maraschino cherry juice added in along with a few cherries, and do you have a food menu?”
I looked at Zoey in surprise. I’d thought we were going to be in and out and on our way, but then my stomach growled. I smiled at the bartender. “I’ll have what she’s having.”
“You got it,” the barkeeper said.
Twenty minutes later, Zoey and I were sharing a surprisingly delicious bowl of spinach artichoke dip along with some equally delicious dry-rubbed spiced buffalo wings.
I waved the bartender over. “Do these get ordered from somewhere?” I imagined enormous clear cellophane bags packed full of frozen, pre-spiced chicken wings dropped into vats of bubbling oil by the handful.
“Nope, everything’s made fresh,” he said, leaning on outstretched arms again. He had small crinkle lines at the corners of his eyes, and I wondered if he might be older than his flawless good looks originally made me think.
I felt like hitting my head on the bar top. I was being outdone by the food from a nightclub. I really was a terrible cook.
“You have a chef?”
“No, no… I do it.”
“You?”
He chuckled. “One of the perks owning the place. Catch me later tonight and I’ll be cleaning the bathrooms and mopping the floors.”
No way. He owned the place? “How old are you?”
He tossed his small bar towel over his shoulder. “Thirty-two.”
He was older than me. I’d been thinking he was younger than Zoey and moonlighting here while attending college during the day. My mind was officially blown. On top of that, I felt as though I’d found a kindred spirit. Here was a person at the forefront of keeping a business akin to my café afloat. The entire time that we’d been sitting at the bar, we hadn’t seen anyone else working there. “How did you come to own a place called ‘Madame X?’”
“Had been working here a few years when the chance to buy the owner out came up. I jumped at it.”
“Are you here every night?” Zoey asked.
“Pretty much,” he said. He reached his hand across the bar in an invitation to shake. “John Grimwald.”
We both shook his hand.
“This is Zoey Jin and I’m Kylie Berry. I own Sarah’s Eatery.”
“Oh, nice! Well… I’ve been hearing things, but it’s still nice to meet you.”
At least he was upfront about it.
“Hearing things?” I prompted.
“Yeah, you know, words like homicide and food poisoning.”
To be called out in this way by someone else who provided food and services to the public was mortifying.
“And now people are talking about a ritual decapitation that happened right out in front of your place.” He laughed, but then he stopped. Suddenly he looked concerned. “Everything okay here, ladies? Do we have a problem? The meal is totally on the house. I just don’t want any problems.”
Ahhh, the power of fear working its magic again.
“There’s no problem,” I said a tad dismissively, but that was the exact moment Zoey said, “We definitely have a problem.”
John’s eyes went back and forth between the two of us. It was clear from his expression that he was still unsure about us. I wondered if he had a Louisville Slugger baseball bat underneath the counter.
Zoey leaned forward onto her elbows. “Did you know Cameron Caldwell?”
“Cam? Sure. Before he, you know, got decapitated, that is.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Is it true that his head was propped up with a candy cane wedged into the stump of his neck?”
“One of those really big thick ones,” Zoey confirmed.
I glared at her. Then to John, I said, “Cam was strangled. No open wounds that I could see.”
“Yeah… ‘cause you found him.” He was looking at me like he was trying to figure out if he needed to search for his under-the-counter bat. “And you killed that other woman, too. Rachel somethin’.”
Him saying “too” was not lost on me.
“Rachel Summers. I didn’t kill her. I swear.” I was starting to think that it would be easier—and maybe more helpful—to say that I had. Everyone was assuming I had anyway, and no one seemed to be in a hurry to tick me off. On the other hand, I was sure that having the reputation of a serial killer in the making wouldn’t do much for business. Suicidal customers might keep coming… or start coming, but everyone else would steer clear.
“John,” I continued, “were you working last Thursday evening?”
“Yeah,
I was here. That was the night Cam got killed.”
“It was,” I said. “Can you tell us if Patty Rogerton was here?”
“Cam’s ex? Oh yeah, she was here. Her and her posse were having a real hate-fest night at Cam’s expense. As in literally. Patty was using Cam’s credit card to pay for everything.”
My heart skipped a beat. Could Patty have strangled Cam, kept him dead and locked away in the trunk of her car, come here, used his credit card to party the night away, and then dumped his body in front of the café? Only someone who didn’t care if they got caught would do such a thing. When we’d talked to her at the school, she hadn’t seemed like a woman determined to live her final hours of freedom to the fullest. She’d seemed like a woman wanting to move on with her life. Besides that, she apparently had a different strategy in mind for offing Cam if she’d ever decided to get around to it. She had a bottle of poison with his name on it.
“You didn’t question her about it?” Zoey asked.
John looked chagrined and shrugged. “He kinda had it coming if you ask me. Her using his credit,” he added hurriedly, “not the other stuff.”
“Why’d he have it coming?” I asked.
“Him and Patty, they’d been tight. Well over two years. They way they’d look at each other, I thought they were both in it for life. Then boom, he dropped her and started bringing some other girl around, and it was those two’s turn to look all doe-eyed at each other like it would never end. No transition. No downtime for him. Just boom. I’m tellin’ ya, it was cold. I felt so bad for Patty.”
“Who was the other girl?” Zoey asked.
“Um…” John looked around him as he thought, and then met our eyes again when he had it. “Marla. I think it was Marla.”
“And this all happened recently?” I asked.
“Happened at the end of summer, right before school started back. Last time the two of them were in here together, they were getting one last celebration in before Patty had to start the school year.”
“Was Patty mad at Cam?” Zoey asked.
John’s eyes went wide. “Oh yeah. Never seen someone so mad. She was out for blood.” John seemed to realize what he’d said. “I don’t mean like that. Not like that. Patty’s a good girl. Nice. Sweet as anything.”
She certainly had the look down pat. She was the picture of wholesome innocence at the school until she mentioned the little bottle of poison. But maybe none of that mattered. She’d been here on Thursday night, spending Cam’s money.
“Do you have security cameras?” Zoey asked.
“Closed-circuit ones. The feed doesn’t go anywhere. Stored on some CDs in the back.”
“Mind if we see the footage?” Zoey asked.
“Well, as long as we’re good and we’re not going to have any problems,” he said, glancing at me, “I suppose that’d be okay.”
Chapter 20
I’d never seen such a pretty girl crush a beer can on her forehead before,” Zoey said. We were getting out of her car in the parking lot behind her apartment’s building.
“She didn’t even flinch.”
The closed-circuit video system we’d watched at Madame X’s had been more entertaining than informative. Patty and her friends had arrived before the time of Cam’s death and had partied long afterward. John had pretended not to notice what credit card Patty had used to pay for the night’s fun. He’d figured she was due her revenge. What I wanted to know was whether that revenge included hiring Mister Dark-and-Dangerous Shadow Man to put an end to all of Cam’s hopes and dreams while she partied the night away with her friends.
As for Patty’s bruises and the cast on her arm, even from the high and distant angle of the security camera, she’d been pretty messed up. If Cam had given her those bruises, it hadn’t been while he was dying. It couldn’t have been. Given the timeline indicated on the video, Patty and Cam were in two different locations when Cam was being killed. Patty’s injuries would have had to have happened prior to Cam’s death, and that supported Patty’s story that she had gotten her injuries from a car accident.
I wondered if I should ask Zoey if she could hack the police database to search for an official police report to prove Patty’s story about getting injured in a car accident. If it had instead been Cam who had hurt Patty, she might have hired someone to do her dirty work for her. But if Cam didn’t mess her up, there would have been a lot less motive for Patty to have Cam killed. But I liked Zoey. In fact, I liked her so much I’d rather her stay out of jail. So, hacking the police database was currently off the table. We’d put it back on if we started running out of options.
“Want to come up?” Zoey asked when we reached the front of the building.
“Yeah.” But not really. It was heading into early evening. I needed to get back to the café. But making sure Zoey’s stalker ex wasn’t waiting in ambush outside her door was more important.
Upstairs in the hallway, Zoey and I stopped in our tracks and stared. It was indeed ambush time, but not in the way I’d thought.
“That ain’t fighting fair,” I said. Sitting in front of Zoey’s door was a bouquet of long stem roses held in the teeth of a five foot puppy dog with big droopy ears. It was adorable.
“You don’t think he’s in there, do you?” Zoey asked.
I studied it. If he scrunched down, he could fit. “Maybe.”
“I’ll set it on fire,” Zoey said. “If he’s inside, that’ll flush him out.”
I stared at the stuffed dog’s huge, sad puppy eyes. I envisioned it romping through my nightmares with singed stuffing dangling out its ears if she hurt the thing. “I’ll just check it,” I said, hurrying forward. Standing next to it, I reached out with one hand and picked the dog up by the back of its neck. It took all my strength to lift it, but if Max were hiding inside, I wouldn’t be able to lift it at all.
“All clear!” I patted the tiny-home sized puppy on the head, happy to have won it a reprieve. “If you decide you don’t want it, we could take it over to the children’s wing of the hospital later.”
“Oh, I like that!”
We parted ways, and I headed across the street to the café. I stepped through the front door expecting to see a place empty enough to take a nap in the middle of the floor without anyone noticing. Instead it was pandemonium. Well, if pandemonium could be defined as a distraught waiter and waitress following around an egomaniacal, short Italian man with a shaggy caterpillar superglued to his upper lip, then that’s what it was.
“Roberto!” I exclaimed. “Have you come back?” From what my cousin Sarah had said, he had been the real magic in her food. But when the café had become mine, Roberto had remained chef of Sarah’s Eatery for one whole day. On the second day, he was gone. No call. No note. No show. Just gone.
But now Roberto was back, and I felt like throwing my arms around him—“He’s the new health inspector!”—to strangle him.
“What?” I asked Melanie. She couldn’t have said what I’d thought she’d just said. Her curls bobbed and bounced around her pretty heart-shaped face as she emphatically nodded her head. I turned to Roberto. “What’s this about? I haven’t changed anything about how you kept the kitchen. I’ve kept it all the same. Everything’s in order.”
His bark of laughter filled the otherwise empty café. “In order? One hundred and six infractions. That’s how many corrections are needed to keep your establishment open.”
“To keep it open?” A whooshing noise was growing inside my ears. I was pretty sure it was my blood pressure. I was going to stroke out. Fall over dead. Twenty-nine years old. Unwed. Mother of none. So little would be said about me at my funeral. The obituary would be something like she lived, she died, and she occasionally tried really hard.
I sat down in the nearest chair and put my head between my knees. The whole room was tilting, and I held on to the table next to me to keep from sliding onto the floor and out the door.
“Sign here,” Roberto said, shoving a clipboard under my n
ose. With a shaky hand, I signed the empty line waiting for my name. He then tore off the duplicate sheets, bearing checkmarks next to all of the very many infractions, and tossed them at my feet. “You have forty-five days,” he said and left.
“I heard he’s dating Dorothy,” Sam whispered loudly to Melanie. The news made the room tilt a little more, and I groaned.
At least I’d learned one useful thing. Max hadn’t set me up. It had been Dorothy.
Always Dorothy.
Chapter 21
Dawn was breaking outside, and the café was empty except for me. I was finishing up a definite Oops board addition. What began as a quiche had become loaded scrambled eggs with the bonus of flaky, buttery pie crust.
I’d tasted it. I thought it worked.
The café door’s dangling bell rang out as Brad strolled in. He made it to within five feet of the grill bar’s counter before planting his feet and putting his hands on his hips. I scooped him up some of the eggs and put it on the counter. I’ll admit it. I was eager for him to try my newest creation.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Brad asked.
I looked from him to the dish and back again. “It’s eggs. It’s always eggs. Wait. Did you get bad news from the doctor or something? Is your cholesterol high?”
“No, my cholesterol’s not high! It’s perfect. My whole family, all of us have perfect cholesterol. I could eat two pounds of bacon a day and still have the cholesterol of a vegan.”
Still not looking happy, he plopped himself down on a stool in front of the eggs and took a bite. “This looks terrible. Tastes great, but looks terrible. Maybe you should require your customers to wear blindfolds.”
A Berry Murderous Kitten: A Laugh-Out-Loud Kylie Berry Mystery (Kylie Berry Mysteries Book 2) Page 10
