Key Lime Die: A Key West Culinary Cozy - Book 2

by Summer Prescott

  “There is a very good explanation for all this,” Marilyn said, her brow furrowed. “I had no idea that Joseph had food allergies. I would never, ever, hurt someone on purpose, even a jerk like Joseph Hernandez,” she grimaced.

  “According to everyone that I’ve spoken with this morning, Joseph had a fairly well known allergy to tree nuts. It was so severe that he didn’t allow any pies with nuts in them to be made in his store,” Bernard supplied, watching her closely.

  “I always wondered why he didn’t make pecan pie or coconut cream,” Marilyn mused.

  “I found it rather strange that the pie you had delivered to Hernandez incorporated nuts. I’ve never seen Key Lime prepared that way,” the detective said casually.

  “A Key Lime pie made with nuts? I would never!” she gasped, appalled at the thought of adulterating her perfect creations with nuts. “But even if someone else had mixed nuts into the pie, Joseph is a pie man, he would have noticed that right away and never eaten any of it,” Marilyn replied, resenting his cool appraisal.

  “They were added in so skillfully that it clearly had to have been done by someone who knew their way around pies.”

  “Like me,” she clamped her teeth together, trying not to grind her teeth in frustration.

  “Right,” Bernard looked closely at Marilyn and she was strongly struck by his magnetism, despite his deliberately professional detachment. She couldn’t believe that she was even thinking about the handsome detective at a time like this. From her perspective, he seemed to think that she might indeed by Joseph Hernandez’s killer.

  “But what about an epi-pen? Don’t most people with allergies that drastic carry them around with them? Why wouldn’t he have used it?” Marilyn asked, not really expecting an answer.

  “Apparently, he keeps two handy, one in his office and one at the front counter,” the detective said, watching carefully to gauge her reaction.

  “In case one day this happened and they needed to medicate him,” she nodded. “Makes sense. So why didn’t he use one of them?”

  Detective Bernard Cortland stared at her, saying nothing. Marilyn shifted around, feeling like a bug under a microscope until she finally put two and two together.

  “I’m guessing that both pens were gone,” she sighed, realizing just how much trouble she was potentially in. “And I had access to both places yesterday, when I stormed the gates,” she concluded miserably.

  Bernard didn’t have to say a thing, his silence spoke volumes.

  “So what do I do now?”

  “Marilyn, for now, don’t do anything, just cooperate with McNabe, and I’ll be looking into alternative explanations,” he instructed, his gaze grim.

  “Sounds like maybe I should get an attorney,” she muttered, frustrated to no end.

  “Do what you have to do,” the detective responded.

  Chapter 10

  Marilyn felt dazed and afraid as she walked back to her own shop, the bright, cheery colors of it beckoning to her as a refuge from the ugliness of the outside world. She planned to send Tiara home for the day and close the shop until this whole mess blew over. The last thing she wanted to do was to expose her daughter once again to the seamy underbelly of crime—not after what happened last time.

  If everyone in Joseph’s store knew about the epi-pens and his allergies then, by her reckoning, everyone in the store was a better candidate for murdering him than she was. She thought of Cynthia and pulled out her cell phone. She took a deep breath and called the number that Joseph’s soon-to-be-ex-wife had provided.

  It made sense to Marilyn that, given the intensity of contempt that the woman had for her philandering husband, she should be the strongest candidate for murder. She might want to kill him off before he could hide his assets from her, or go for the jugular in the divorce. Cynthia was seemingly terribly offended by her husband’s behavior, but who knew what skeletons she might have in her own closet? Marilyn’s shoulders ached with tension. as she listen to ring after ring, waiting for Cynthia to answer her phone. When she didn’t receive a response on her first try, she hit redial. What if Cynthia hadn’t yet been told of Joseph’s demise? Or what if she’d just been told and was in a state of shock?

  Marilyn set her mouth in a thin line of determination. She had to be heartless right now if she wanted to have a prayer of keeping herself out of jail for a very long time.

  Once again Cynthia’s phone rolled over to voicemail, but his time Marilyn waited on the line to leave a message.

  “Hola, you’ve reached Cynthia Hernandez, I am in Puerto Rico until the sixteenth. Please leave me a message and I will respond to your call as soon as possible upon my return.” Crossing Joseph’s wife off of her mental list of suspects, Marilyn hung up her phone, discouraged. It was possible that she could have paid someone, or set a plan in motion prior to leaving the country, but that seemed like a bit of a stretch, even with her active imagination.

  “Ok,” Marilyn said aloud, trying to prepare herself to act as though nothing was wrong. She’d just made it to her sunny little shop and Tiara’s smile through the windows was so sweet and innocent that she just wanted to stand there and savor the moment, but she needed to do whatever she could to track down Joseph’s true killer do before she ended up behind bars.

  “Hi sweetheart, we’re closing down the shop for the day. Executive decision. Go home and hang out with the girls and I’ll call you later, ok?” Marilyn had done her best to breeze in with the look of someone who didn’t have a care in the world.

  “What’s wrong?” Tiara demanded, giving her a no-nonsense stare. Apparently there was no fooling her ever-perceptive daughter.

  “Nothing, why do you ask,” Marilyn avoided her eyes and pretended to go over the days receipts.

  “Mom, I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s on your mind,” she insisted, crossing her arms and tapping her foot impatiently.

  “Well,” her mother’s façade crumbled. “Maybe you should sit down.”

  “Sit down? Oh boy, is it that bad? What happened?” Tiara asked, more gently this time, pulling out a chair at one of the bistro tables in front of the windows.

  “I’m only going to tell you this because you’re going to find out sooner or later and I’d rather be the one to tell you. So… Joseph, you know the Joseph I’m talking about right?”

  “Mom,” Tiara said impatiently.

  Marilyn took a deep breath, “He was found dead this morning, and from the way the detectives spoke to me, I think they suspect me of murdering him.”

  “Very funny mom,” her daughter replied, waiting for her mother to confess what was actually bothering her.

  Marilyn exhaled and slumped into a chair, dropping her head into her hands.

  “Wait, you’re not kidding are you?” Tiara’s eyes grew wide and scared.

  “Oh honey, I’m so frustrated and scared right now,” Marilyn reached for her daughter’s hands. “I know that we’ll get through this, we always do, but I need to figure out who did this before something happens that’ll keep me from digging into it.”

  Marilyn knew from previous experience that if she let herself get emotional now she would be a wreck for hours if not days, and a wreck could not solve a murder. She needed to emotionally distance herself from the whole thing and try to pretend like it had nothing to do with her, which was far more easily said than done.

  Tiara squeezed her mother’s hands, speechless.

  “Help me close up?” Marilyn asked, standing wearily. Her daughter nodded and the two began work silently, side by side, to close up the store. Marilyn went through the cleaning and shutting down process by habit, barely even thinking about what she was doing.

  “Tiara, can you tell me everything you remember about what happened when you dropped off the pie to Joseph last night?” she asked, thinking.

  “Well, let’s see…the shop was closed for the night by the time that I got there, but there was still a light on in the back. I had the pie in the passeng
er seat of my car and if he hadn’t answered the door, I had planned on putting it in the fridge at the apartment,” she recounted slowly.

  “Ok,” Marilyn said trying to picture everything just as her daughter had seen it. “Which light was on?”

  “One of the ones in the back, maybe an office light, or just a few of the overheads by the back door, I couldn’t really tell,” Tiara replied.

  Marilyn nodded, taking it all in.

  “Did you try to open the door?” Marilyn asked.

  “Yeah, but it was locked.”

  “Ok,” she nodded

  “So, then I knocked on it.”

  “Why did you knock? Don’t they have a buzzer like ours?”

  Tiara thought for a moment, “Yes, and I tried it but it must have been broken or something. I couldn’t hear anything when I pressed it, so I knocked instead.”

  “And then…?”

  “Joseph came to the door,” Marilyn opened her mouth to speak but Tiara cut her off. “He was wearing normal clothes, black pants and a maroon button-down shirt. I noticed his watch when he unlocked the door, it was really flashy and expensive looking. I’d guess that it was worth at least a couple thousand dollars.”

  “Do you remember if he was right or left handed?”

  “No, I have no clue, it’s kind of hard to determine that just from seeing him unlock a door,” she made a face, wondering why on earth her mother had asked such a strange and seemingly irrelevant question.

  “Ok, then what?”

  “Then I gave him the pie with the note. I said—”

  “—Did he say anything first?”

  Tiara sighed. Marilyn could tell from the look on her daughter’s face that she wasn’t appreciating all the interruptions as she was trying to recall specifics of her encounter with Joseph Hernandez.

  “I think he said they were closed. Maybe, ‘we’re closed,’ or something like that,” she shrugged.

  “Why would he come to the door to tell you that?” Marilyn wondered aloud.

  “Maybe because I rang the bell?” Tiara blinked at her.

  Marilyn nodded and rubbed her temples. “Good point,” she acknowledged, thinking that clearly she was not cut out for police work.

  “So, I told him that I was delivering the pie on your behalf, and that we’re really trying to be rational adults about everything and that I hoped he would be too.’”

  “That sounds a bit passive aggressive, but at least it was a goodwill gesture,” Marilyn said, shuddering a bit at the thought of her daughter having to interact with the sleazy business owner. Who was now dead, she reminded herself.

  “And I said something about you being a good person,” Tiara admitted, blushing and not looking at her mother.

  Despite her somewhat dire circumstances, that made Marilyn smile a bit.

  “Then I gave him the pie,” she finished, shrugging.

  “What did he say then?” her mother asked.

  “I think he was just really confused—he didn’t seem to get it at all. He probably had no idea who I was and who my mom was.”

  “Right,” Marilyn was shifting through her mind. “Did you watch him go back into the office?”

  “I’m not a stalker, I handed it to him then left, it would have been really weird to stay any longer than I did,” Tiara gave her mother a pointed look.

  She imagined what she would do if she were Joseph. Read the note first, look at the pie, have a slice, throw the pie away…she bit her lip.

  “I’ve got to go, I want you to go home ok?”

  “But, I’m not finished cleaning, there are still closing duties that need to be done,” her daughter protested.

  “I know, honey, and I appreciate your concern, but we can leave it alone for now and come back to it later. I have more important things to focus on at the moment,” she shooed her well-intentioned offspring out the door, then went home to look at the list of names that Cynthia Hernandez had given her.

  Chapter 11

  “Silvia!” Marilyn called out, tapping on the young baker’s apartment door. She knew that coming here was probably an awful, and potentially dangerous, idea, but she was grasping at straws at this point. She was as jumpy as a cat on the fourth of July, startling at shadows and expecting that at any moment Inspector McNabe was going to pull up and slam some handcuffs on her. “Silvia, can you answer the door please? I need to talk to you,” she persisted, out of desperation.

  The door opened an inch and Marilyn could see that the security chain was in place.

  “You need to leave, I’ve just called the police.” Silvia’s contemptuous response wafted through the crack.

  “Please, I’m harmless—I’m a pie maker, just like you. I just need to ask you a few questions. Please, I think we both know who killed Joseph,” she intimated, hoping it would literally get her foot in the door.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who could possibly have killed Joseph if it wasn’t you, you overreactive bully?” Silivia asked, a note of doubt creeping into her voice.

  “Cynthia,” Marilyn said. “Who else could it be? She was the only one who stood to gain anything as a result of her husband’s death,” she shrugged.

  Silvia unlatched the door and opened it a few inches. “You can’t come in, just ask me what you want to ask then leave,” she ordered, her flawless jaw set.

  Marilyn’s question was designed to blindside the girl into making an admission, and she made sure she watching the pretty young thing carefully when she asked it.

  “Were you sleeping with Joseph Hernandez?” she locked eyes with the blonde, unashamed of her direct manner. She was counting on Silvia’s face to answer the question.

  Silvia opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again.

  “That’s what I thought,” Marilyn turned around and ran to her car, thankful that she hadn’t heard the sound of police sirens just yet. She drove seven blocks north, and pulled over to dial Detective Bernard Cortland’s number.

  “Marilyn?” he responded, picking up immediately.

  So he had her number in his phone directory, for some reason she was oddly pleased by that, but forced herself to focus on the matter at hand. “ Hi, Bernard,” she said, relieved that he had taken the call.

  “Can you meet me at 73 Fleming Street? It’s really important,” she implored

  “Marilyn, what are you doing? You’re supposed to be home—”

  “I know,” she had the grace to sound guilty. But I can’t stand just trusting my fate to whatever happens. I’m not about to be falsely accused if I can help it, please just meet me at 73 Fleming Street,” she asked again, then hung up, fearful that soon patrol cars would be lurking around every corner. Marilyn knew that the detective didn’t exactly know what to think about her, but she hoped that he knew her at least well enough to get past his suspicions and meet her. He would come, she crossed her fingers, keeping an eye out for his car.

  She parked down at the end of the block, beside some trees that made it more difficult to see her car in the dark. Her fingers nervously tapped the steering wheel. What could possibly be taking him so long?

  After what seemed like hours but was probably more like a few minutes, she saw his car pull in down the street. She’d given him an address a full block away from the place that she actually wanted him to see. Getting out of her car, she walked quickly over to him, moving as quietly as possible. Seeing that Bernard was by himself, she sighed with relief. If he hadn’t come alone, there’s no way that her plan would have worked.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Marilyn said softly when she approached.

  “I wish I could say the same. What am I doing here Marilyn?” he looked at her skeptically. “Tell me what’s going on,” the detective ordered in a manner that made her fear imminent arrest if this didn’t go well.

  “Do you think that, just for the next ten minutes, you could trust me?” she pleaded, her eyes wide.

  Bernard stared at her, grumpy and unconvinced
by her doe-eyed manner. “Ten minutes,” he begrudgingly acquiesced.

  Marilyn nodded with relief and gratitude, then started hurrying toward her car. “I’ll drive,” she called over her shoulder. The detective followed, against his better judgment, getting in to the passenger side.

  “Wait,” he said, taking in his surroundings after buckling his seat belt. “I know where we are…What exactly are we doing here? Do you know something about—”

  Marilyn put a hand up to halt his questions. “Ten minutes…please. It’ll all make sense soon, I promise.” She turned the keys in the ignition, so that the air conditioner could get a head start on cooling the air inside the car on this sultry Key West evening, but didn’t put it in gear yet, picking up her cell phone to call her daughter.

  Bernard’s jaw rippled as he tried to clamp a lid down on his annoyance, resisting the impulse to exit the car and tell Marilyn to go on her way.

  “Are you ok?” Tiara answered her phone immediately.

  “Yes, sweetie, I’m fine” Marilyn replied as reassuringly as she could. “But I need you to do something for me.”

  Tiara waited, “Like what?”

  “Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I just heard that Paige was Joseph’s mistress, not Silvia. The police know all about it, and I overheard the detectives say something about an funds and an account… I’m afraid that your friend may be in deep trouble. I need your help to find out what she knows and who might be framing her. I’m thinking that the person who is framing her is probably the person who is framing me too,” Marilyn closed her eyes, doing what had to be done.

  Tiara sounded worried on the other end, “Oh my, that’s horrible!” she exclaimed. “I’ll call right now, unless you think I should go over there in person…?”

  “No, this really needs to be addressed pretty quickly, can you just call her now?” her mother asked, feeling small, but determined.

  “Absolutely, I’ll call her as soon as I get off the phone with you,” she promised.

  Marilyn breathed a sigh of relief and uncrossed the fingers that she’d unconsciously crossed while speaking with her daughter. “Thanks sweetie,” she said, before hanging up and starting the car. She travelled a very short distance, backed up into space tucked away from immediate view, and settled in to wait.