Cream Puff Murder

by Joanne Fluke

Sally says to tell you she’s going to make some with Sugar-Free Strawberry Kiwi Jell-O on the top layer and decorate each glass with a slice of kiwi because that’s really exotic here in Lake Eden, Minnesota.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Norman and I will be right back.” Hannah rose to her feet and motioned to Norman. “We’re just going to dash to the kitchen and compliment Sally on her Guilt-Free Parfait.”

  Delores pulled a stack of papers from her briefcase-sized purse. They were stapled together, and Hannah assumed they constituted the list of names her mother and Carrie had called on the phone. “Go ahead, dear. I just want to go over these names with Carrie one more time. If you see our waitress, would you ask her to leave a large carafe of coffee?”

  “I’ll make sure she does that, Delores,” Norman promised.

  “Thank you, dear. That’s very sweet of you.”

  Hannah couldn’t believe what she had just heard. Dear? At some time when she hadn’t been looking, Norman had been elevated from Norman to dear.

  “I should call Lonnie,” Michelle pushed back her chair. “He may have some information for us. The reception’s better in the lobby, so I’ll just go out there to call.”

  Andrea jumped up. “Hold on and I’ll go with you. I need to check on the kids.”

  Hannah gave a glance back at the booth as everyone bailed. Carrie and Delores didn’t look at all upset, and she guessed it was okay with them. What on earth could she ask them to do that would be exciting and not injurious to their health?

  “You look worried,” Norman commented.

  “Just trying to think of something the mothers can do.”

  Norman reached out to take her hand as they walked down the hallway to the kitchen. “That’s a tough one. They’re going to know if you feed them a placebo.”

  “Nicely put,” Hannah teased him. “Do they teach about placebos in dental college?”

  “Dental school,” Norman corrected her. “It’s just like med school, except it’s for dentists. We take courses in pharmacology so we can prescribe medications.”

  They’d reached the plain wooden door near the end of the hallway. It wasn’t marked in any way, but both Norman and Hannah knew it led to Sally’s kitchen.

  “Let’s go,” Hannah said, pushing it open and stepping into the busy interior of a working restaurant kitchen. “Come on, Norman. Let’s find Sally and tell her we love her parfait.”

  Less than a minute later, Hannah and Norman were standing in the office Sally called her own, a room just off the busy restaurant kitchen. Large picture windows looked out onto the controlled chaos of the kitchen, providing Sally with a view of what her chefs and servers were doing on this busy night.

  “Sit down and have one of my special espressos,” Sally said, pouring them both an espresso in the doll-sized cups Turkish coffee had made popular.

  “The parfait was great,” Norman told her, leading off the conversation.

  “I know. I tasted it. I’m thinking about adding it to the menu. But enough about desserts. I’ve got some news for you,” Sally leaned across her desk. “You’re working to solve Ronni’s murder, aren’t you, Hannah?”

  “Yes, Norman and I are working on it together.”

  “Well, you might not know it, but Ronni came out here last week looking for a cocktail waitress job. I told her we really didn’t have cocktail waitresses, that if there was a big crowd in the bar, our regular wait staff filled in. She said that was fine, and she told me she’d worked as a cocktail waitress at The Moosehead Bar and Grill and that they served food in the bar. She said she quit that job last week because the tips weren’t good and it was too far to drive to Anoka and back every other night.”

  “Did you hire her?” Norman asked.

  “I never hire anyone without checking their job history. The last place she’d listed was The Moosehead, so I called the owner to ask about her. He wouldn’t tell me exactly what Ronni did, but he told me that she lied when she said she quit.”

  “She was fired?” Hannah guessed.

  “That’s right. He said he didn’t want to go into details, but they couldn’t afford to keep her on any longer.”

  “I wonder what that means,” Norman said, looking puzzled.

  “I’m not sure, but I thought maybe you might want to drive to Anoka to check it out.”

  After everyone had a full cup of coffee and their waitress had left a carafe, Hannah pulled out her stenographer’s notebook, the one she’d come to think of as her murder book, and started their discussion. “Why don’t you go first, Mother? Tell us what you and Carrie found out.”

  “You may already know this, but Hannah asked us to call around and see if we could find out who Ronni was involved with,” Delores prefaced her remarks.

  “That’s romantically involved,” Carrie clarified.

  “It turned out to be a much bigger job than we thought it would be.” Delores tapped her finger on the stapled sheets of paper on the table. “It would have been easier to find out who Ronni wasn’t involved with!”

  “Let’s cut to the chase,” Carrie suggested. “We made sixty-seven calls, and we wrote down every name that came up.”

  “We counted the number of times the names were mentioned by other people and arranged them according to…” Delores turned to Hannah. “What’s the word I want, dear?”

  “Frequency?”

  “Yes, frequency. If twenty people mentioned a name, we put it ahead of a name that only came up nineteen times.” Delores passed the list down to Hannah. “Here’s the list, but I don’t think it’ll do you much good. Every single name except three have alibis. We printed those three names out in red so they’d be easy to spot.”

  Hannah was almost afraid to look, but she glanced down at the list. Sure enough, Mike’s name was in the top ten, and it was printed in red.

  “Mike?” Andrea guessed, and Hannah nodded.

  “How about Lonnie?” Michelle asked.

  Hannah flipped to the second page and found Lonnie’s name, also in red. “He’s number thirty.”

  “Bill?” Andrea asked, and her voice quavered slightly.

  Hannah turned over more pages until she spotted the third red name. “He’s on the last page.”

  “We’re so sorry, dear,” Delores said, reaching out to pat Andrea’s hand.

  “It’s okay, Mother. I know all about it, and it’s a mistake. People saw them together and misinterpreted it.”

  “Good for you, dear!” Delores praised her. “Without trust a marriage is worth nothing.” Then she turned to Michelle. “How about you, dear? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Lonnie told me all about it.” Michelle gave a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “We were both dating other people at the time.”

  “Then we’re all okay with our findings,” Delores continued as she turned to Hannah. “I don’t need to worry about you, do I, dear?”

  “Not me, Mother,” Hannah said, flipping the good-sized booklet over so that she didn’t have to focus on Mike’s name. “Let me read you the list of suspects I have so far.”

  Hannah flipped to her page of suspects and went down the list, one by one. “I have Mike, Lonnie, and Bill. You already know about them.”

  “You have Bill?” Andrea looked shocked. “But you know he didn’t do it.”

  “Of course I do. I also know that Mike didn’t do it. And I don’t think Lonnie did it either, but this is an objective list and nobody gets crossed off until they have an airtight alibi, or until someone else proves to be Ronni’s killer.”

  Neither Andrea nor Michelle looked happy, and an uneasy silence fell over their gathering. Finally it was broken when Norman cleared his throat. “Who’s next on your suspect list?” he asked Hannah.

  Bless you! Hannah felt like saying, but of course she didn’t. Instead she glanced down at her list and found the fifth name. “Bridget Murphy.”

  “Of course!” Delores exclaimed. “We should have written her down. Several
people told us about her confrontation with Ronni at Bertanelli’s.”

  “You know Bridget, don’t you, Mother?”

  “Of course I do. Why do you ask?”

  “Norman said you wanted something exciting to do for the investigation. Would you and Carrie like to interview Bridget to see if she has an alibi?”

  “We wanted exciting, not dangerous!” Carrie spoke up. “Bridget Murphy has a temper!”

  “I’ll do it,” Michelle said. “Bridget likes me, and I can figure out some way to ask her that won’t sound like I’m accusing her.”

  “She’s all yours,” Hannah said, making a note on her page. “How about Betty Jackson? She’s next on the suspect list.”

  “But why?” Delores sounded shocked.

  “Ronni insulted her in exercise class, and Betty said she’d get even with her. Charlotte Roscoe told me that Betty went to Duluth to her nephew’s wedding, but I haven’t checked it out yet.”

  “I’ll do it,” Andrea offered. “I have a couple of friends in Duluth.”

  “Then there’s the other suspect Charlotte gave me, Serena Roste.”

  “Who’s that?” Delores asked.

  “Wade Hoffman was engaged to Serena before he got engaged to Ronni. Charlotte said it wasn’t a pretty breakup, especially since Serena and Ronni were close friends before Ronni stole Serena’s fiancé.”

  “Past tense,” Norman noted. “You said they were close friends. Did Charlotte think that Serena might have killed Ronni?”

  “She thought it was a possibility.”

  “I’ll find out about Serena,” Carrie offered. “I have a good friend in Elk River, and I can call her.”

  “Great. Thanks, Carrie.” Hannah jotted it down in her book. “Now how about Loretta Richardson and Trudi Schuman?”

  “Why are they suspects?” Carrie looked puzzled.

  “Ronni insulted them when she substituted for Roger in our class,” Andrea explained.

  “I’ll check their alibis,” Michelle offered. “I’ll drop in on Carly and find out where her mother was that night. Carly’s Mom and Trudi do everything together.”

  Hannah made another note in her book. “How about Babs Dubinski? Who wants to take her?”

  “I will,” Andrea said quickly. “I want to check on that rental property of hers, anyway. Somebody told me she was thinking of putting it on the market.”

  Hannah wrote Andrea’s initials in front of Babs’s name. There was a reason her sister was the top-selling real estate agent in Lake Eden. “How about Immelda Griese?”

  “Wait a minute, dear.” Delores looked slightly confused. “What possible reason could Babs and Immelda have for killing Ronni?”

  “They’re in our class, and Ronni insulted them,” Andrea gave the same explanation. “She also insulted Gail Hansen and Vonnie Blair. Hannah will probably mention them next.”

  “Was there anyone in your class she didn’t insult?” Carrie wanted to know.

  Andrea nodded. “Me. I think she was about to, but Hannah jumped in and asked her whether she was going to spend the whole hour insulting us, or if we could actually do some exercises.”

  “Good girl!” Delores beamed at Hannah. It made Hannah feel about six years old, but it was a very nice feeling.

  “We’ll check on Vonnie Blair,” Carrie volunteered. “Delores and I have to go out to the hospital tomorrow to give blood. They’re having another drive. And on the way back, we’ll stop to see Immelda at the rectory.”

  “I can take care of Gail Hansen,” Norman said. “She’s scheduled for a checkup tomorrow afternoon.”

  “That’s it, then,” Hannah flipped the page, “except for one thing that only Andrea can do for us.”

  Andrea looked surprised. “What’s that?”

  “I need to get the surveillance tapes from the cameras at Heavenly Bodies on the night that Ronni was murdered. I know there won’t be any footage of the murder. We would have heard about that right away. But I’m hoping we can spot something that Detective Parks and the rookies didn’t notice.”

  “Done,” Andrea said. “I’ll ask Bill to bring them home.”

  “Thanks. That’s all I have then.” Hannah closed her notebook.

  “But I thought you were going to give us something exciting to do,” Delores complained. “Talking to Vonnie when we go out to give blood doesn’t quite cut it, dear.”

  “I know. But I really don’t have any…” Hannah stopped and glanced at Norman. And then she started to smile. “I do have something. It’s a real clue, and you’ll have to be careful how you play it. As a matter of fact, you’ll have to go undercover at a bar in Anoka.”

  “Undercover at a bar!” Carrie turned to look at Delores. “We can do that, can’t we?”

  Delores laughed. “Of course we can.”

  “You may have to make a real friend of the bartender to get information,” Hannah told them.

  “Not a problem.” Delores looked supremely confident. “It’s the type of assignment that’s absolutely made for us. Tell us all about it, dear.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Andrea!” Delores pulled her daughter away from the curtain that ensured their privacy. “A good wife doesn’t spy on her husband.”

  “If not me, who?” Andrea countered, causing Hannah to cringe at the grammatical infringement.

  “If not you, me,” Michelle said, putting her eye to the crack where the curtain met the wall. “Where is he sitting?”

  “To the left of the fountain. Right now he’s alone. She was sitting across from him, but her back was to us and I never really had the chance to see anything but the back of her head.”

  “What did that look like?” Hannah asked.

  “Blond hair, fairly short. It looked like an expensive salon cut, but it’s hard to tell from this far away. They just finished their entrées, and I think Bill just ordered coffee.”

  “Cops drink a lot of coffee,” Michelle said. “Lonnie says they go through hundreds of dollars in coffee every week.”

  “She didn’t leave, did she?” Hannah asked.

  “I doubt it. She probably just went to the ladies’ room.”

  Michelle watched for several minutes while the rest of them made casual conversation. Suddenly she laughed. “Relax, Andrea! You don’t have a thing to worry about!”

  “What do you mean?” Delores asked, and Hannah realized that she hadn’t told Michelle that it wasn’t nice to spy. Evidently spying on a husband was a bad thing to do, but it was okay if you spied on your brother-in-law.

  Michelle let the curtain drop and turned around to face them. “The lady cop just came back to Bill’s table, and I saw her before she sat down. There’s no way Bill would be interested in her.”

  “She’s ugly?” Andrea sounded hopeful.

  “No, she’s not ugly. But she’s a lot older than Bill. You were wrong about her hair. It’s gray, not blond. I got a really good look at her and she’s really old, at least fifty, maybe more.”

  “Really…old?” Delores said, her words clipped and her tone as cold as ice.

  Uh-oh! Michelle had put her foot in it this time! Hannah tried to think of something to say to defuse the situation, but before she could come up with a thing, Michelle opened her mouth.

  “Did I say old? I didn’t mean old. Everybody knows that fifty’s not old.” Michelle almost stammered in her hurry to extricate herself. “It’s just that Bill has got to be at least twenty years younger than…well…most of the time, younger men don’t go for women old enough to be their…uh…”

  Delores held up her hand. “Quiet, Michelle. You’re only digging yourself in deeper.”

  “But I really didn’t mean that…”

  “I said that’s enough, Michelle.”

  Delores hadn’t raised her voice, she never did, but Michelle clamped her lips shut tightly. It was childhood all over again, and Mother was angry.

  “It’s time for us to leave.” Delores stood up and motioned to Carrie. �
�Old people need their sleep, you know, and we have a big day coming up tomorrow.”

  “Thank you for dinner, Mother,” Hannah said, hoping to change the subject.

  “Yes, thank you, Delores,” Norman added quickly.

  “Thank you, Mother,” Andrea said. “Dinner was delicious.”

  “Thank you, Mother,” Michelle added her thanks. “Would you like me to go out and bring the car around for you? It’s pretty cold out tonight.”

  “Thank you, Michelle, but no. I realize I’m old, but I think I can still walk to the parking lot without incident.” Delores gave her youngest daughter a withering glance.

  “Oh, boy!” Michelle breathed when the curtain had closed behind her mother and Carrie. “Do you think she’ll ever forgive me?”

  “Of course she’ll forgive you,” Andrea said. “She has to. She’s your mother.”

  “And because she’s your mother, she’ll make you eat a caseload of crow before she forgives you,” Hannah added.

  Andrea’s cell phone rang. She retrieved it from her purse and flipped it open. “This is Andrea.” She listened for a moment and then she smiled. “We can do that, honey. We’d like to meet her, too. We can’t stay long, though. I haven’t given Hannah your notes yet, so I’m running out there before I come home.”

  “What notes?” Hannah asked when Andrea had closed her phone and returned it to her purse.

  “Bill gave me a list of things he thinks you should do to solve the case. I’ll tell you all about it later.”

  “I’ve got notes, too,” Michelle told her. “One set from Lonnie, and another set from Rick.”

  “Same here,” Norman added. “Mike came in this afternoon and gave me a whole list of things he thought you should do.”

  “Catching a killer by committee,” Hannah said with a sigh. Even though she wasn’t looking forward to getting instructions from four different sources, she’d have to listen to all of their suggestions and either accept or reject them. Mike, Lonnie, Rick, and Bill were expecting the impossible if they wanted her to accomplish everything a whole division of detectives would do on a murder case.