“I’m just curious. Why would Alice give it away to one of us rather than back to the person who had funded the effort? I mean, the mystery man paid for the whole thing. He should have had a rightful claim to the truck if they got the money from him.”
Land looked at me with confusion. “Maybe he wanted you to have it. You’re young and don’t have much of a reputation.”
I cringed, thinking that he had me pegged there. I was just known as the kid who sat on her parents’ couch. Someone wouldn’t have to go a long way to discredit me. A food truck of questionable origins was a step up on my social ladder.
“So you’re saying that it could be someone older. What about those two men who signed the will? Maybe it could have been one of them?” I was trying to think of old men who had been associated with the food truck.
Land sighed. “It would have to be the first one, Jones. He was old, but when people die in their 90s, no one asks questions. They just shrug and say that he was old. I could poison him six different ways and I’d get away with it, because no one would suspect his death was anything but natural.”
Before I could speak, he burst out laughing. “Listen to me. You have me talking about killing little old men. My family warned me that America was a violent place, but I don’t think this is what they had in mind. I’m glad that they don’t get to hear me talk like this.”
I liked the sound of his laugh. It was warm and throaty. I hadn’t heard too much of it when he’d worked for me, but now he seemed much more at ease with himself. I guess that running his own truck suited him.
“You have some good ideas. You would have made a great killer, no matter what your parents think.” I gave him a small nod as I finished the dishes and ran some water to wash out the sink. The action reminded me of my close brush with death earlier in the day, and a shiver ran through my entire body.
“Are you okay?” Land asked, approaching me.
“Just remembering my last close encounter with a sink,” I told him. For a change, I was honest with him. I left the sarcasm in my own truck.
He smiled down at me. His eyes twinkled, and his grin grew wider. “I’m glad you’re okay, and I’m glad I was able to help even if I did end up with a knot on my head.” Just as quickly as the moment had begun, it ended. His eyes grew distant and he stepped back from me. No explanation or excuse. He just moved back to where he’d started.
I was confused to say the least. I’d been feeling a little warm in that confined space with him grinning at me, which was a nice change and one I could indulge now that we didn’t work together. However, I had no idea what was going on in his head.
I went back to my normal routine from my truck with Land. I counted out the cash and receipts. I totaled the money for the day and prepped a bag to deposit. I got the cash drawer ready for the morning. All in silence.
Land didn’t look at me as he cleaned the prep surfaces. He went about his business as though he were wearing headphones.
However, I decided that if I was going to work this hard for someone else’s truck, I was going to get my money’s worth out of my questioning. “Why did my aunt go with hot dogs? I mean, business is good, but it’s limiting.”
He didn’t look up. “Allergies. Shirley was deathly allergic to peanuts. You’d be surprised how many foods contain traces of peanuts. They’re in oils and several entrees. Chinese food has them. It’s ridiculous. When we went to make a menu, we had to be careful what we chose. That was one reason I made several of the condiments myself. It was habit by the time you came here, and the customers expected it.”
I nodded. I remembered Alice having a similar condition. One time we’d gone to the movies and someone at the matinee had thrown shells on the floor. She’d swollen up like a balloon to my lasting horror. She’d been taken to the hospital in an ambulance, but she’d deflated once the peanuts were out of the picture. They still kept her there overnight. We’d been a DVD family after that.
“Do you think it’s possible that they were related? After all, they have a similar health condition that’s not too common?”
Land snickered. “No, they were not related. Trust me on this one. They were girlfriends. They might have both had the same condition, but that was a fluke—not a genetic link. You don’t have it, and you’re Alice’s family.”
He was right there. I was still trying to make a pattern of all I knew. However, there seemed to be so many things working at cross-purposes that I couldn’t get my finger on any one item and see that it pointed me in the correct direction. It was like ping-pong.
“So what do you think about a breakfast menu?” I asked, thinking back to my meeting with my father. If that was the only reason I was limiting myself on the menu, I could easily expand now.
“For you?” he asked. “I would be careful. I’d make sure that you stick to the menu you have for a few weeks. You’ve just added a lot of additional work to your load. You have to do everything that you did, and now you have to do everything that I did too. That’s a lot for one person.”
I nodded. I was actually glad to have a couple of days off until the police finished with the food truck. I knew that I’d be swamped as soon as I re-opened. I’d be coming in an hour or two earlier and leaving later than before. The food truck was going to consume my life, such as it was. “I just wondered. I was thinking about it the other day.”
“Stick to the basics for now. I’ve seen a lot of places go under because they want to keep messing with the menu. That’s a beginner’s mistake.”
“Are you sticking with the Meat Treats menu?” I asked. “It was a lot of fried food and bad coffee as I recall.”
Land laughed again. I tingled a bit at the sound of it, which was not a good thing in my book. Even if we were no longer boss and employee, I was pretty certain that he didn’t see me that way. No use getting my hopes up for something that wouldn’t happen.
“No, I’m changing things here. I’m improving the coffee, and we’ll be making a variety of meat recipes that don’t involve grease and lard. They still used that stuff; it’s a heart attack in a can.” He frowned as he continued to clean the surfaces. This was probably the most we’d ever talked during the cleanup portion of the day. I enjoyed the easy banter and the variety of topics. This is what I was giving up when I told Land I would let him go, and when I gave him the safety net of taking him back if something went wrong. I was sad for a moment, thinking I’d lost something I didn’t even know that I had. Still it was the right thing to do, and I knew it.
We finished the cleaning and I promised to be back tomorrow afternoon to help. The police had estimated that I wouldn’t be back in business for two more days, so I knew I could easily honor the promise for a few more days without breaking a sweat.
I drove home, wondering about the decisions that had been made with the truck. Someone had bought the truck, but it hadn’t been bequeathed to him. The truck had passed through multiple owners and no one seemed to have earned anywhere near enough profit to make the initial investment back.
I found the plans for the truck on the table when I got home, but I chose not to look at those. Instead, I rolled them up and slid the cylinder into an old umbrella stand. I didn’t want to be reminded that I’d spent the morning hidden in a tiny space under the sink waiting for a bullet to end my life. I wasn’t sure what I did want, but it certainly wasn’t that.
Chapter 11
I showed up the next day for Land’s cleanup at the appointed time. I had run out of questions yesterday about my aunt and the truck, so we started the cleaning process in relative silence.
That didn’t mean that no one had any questions. Detective Danvers showed up at Meat Treats shortly after we’d begun to clean. He was carrying his notebook in his left hand, and he was fumbling for a pen as he approached. “I have a few more questions for you about yesterday,” he said, looking at me.
I shrugged, but kept cleaning, glad for once that I had the protection of a scrub bush and Land’s watchf
ul eye as Danvers came around. “What about?”
“I just find it rather fortuitous on your part that all those shots were fired, and you weren’t harmed at all. Rather like a magician’s trick.”
“I just consider it luck or maybe brains.” I didn’t want to give myself too much credit, but I had chosen the one place in the truck where I could have held out indefinitely. “Or maybe the shooter didn’t want to kill me, but just scare me out of business.” I hadn’t actually considered this last thought until it came out of my mouth, but now I had to wonder. What if the main objective of the shooter had been to scare me? Taking care of me by changing the will hadn’t worked. I still wondered if the person behind all of this had really thought it would. Even so, it seemed unlikely that this was just a scare. If I’d been clipped on the first shot, I would have fallen and been hit someplace more vital on the next shot.
“Well, he sure did a good job on that last one. I haven’t seen you in your truck since it happened.” Danvers looked from Land to me and then back again. It seemed like there was another question there, but Danvers didn’t ask it and I wasn’t sure how to answer it. We did look domestic, but it was more of my plan to get answers rather than to get a boyfriend.
“I’m just picking up some extra work,” I lied. “I don’t want to get out of practice at washing dishes.”
He grunted in reply, but then turned to Land. “So you certainly made out well in this deal. You’ve got your own Meat Treats truck now and some help with the cleaning. You must just live right.”
If Danvers’ words had been designed to instill a huge sense of doubt, they were effective. Land had definitely made out well in the latest turn of events. Not only was he running his own truck, which he’d told me so often that he’d wanted to do, but he also had me working for him. Shades of what he told me my aunt had promised him.
I thought about the will that had been found and the one that had been probated; I wondered what the purpose of the will was and why they would be linked in that manner. I had a lot of questions, and I had no more answers than Danvers did. I knew if I came up with some information, I might be able to parlay it into a dinner with him to share my findings.
Neither of the men spoke, but they each continued to stand in place. They were almost like a set of statues. I couldn’t imagine what had brought this standoff to pass. They’d been talking about my help, and by the looks of it, neither one of them really wanted it. I still hadn’t heard a good answer as to why these two disparate men knew each other. Just one more thing I didn’t understand around here.
Danvers finally walked away without saying another word.
“That wasn’t awkward at all,” I said as soon as I was sure that Danvers was out of earshot.
“I’m not sure what he’s doing right now. He doesn’t have any new leads except for you getting shot at. I think he’s just trying to stir things up so that he can get someone to react. I don’t think that strategy’s going to work. The people behind this are too crafty for that.” Land didn’t look at me while he spoke, but I was used to that. He hid his emotions well.
I looked at him and remembered that English wasn’t his first language. “Crafty” just wasn’t a word that I heard every day. After I finished pondering the marvels of language, I started thinking about what he’d said and what Danvers had implied.
Land had been very certain in his use of the plural. There were people behind this, not a single entity, but a group. Throughout this case, I’d been confused by the seemingly opposed events that continued to happen. I’d inherited the food truck because my aunt’s death seemed like a possible murder, but then others seemed to want me out of the way. Why give me a truck and then bump me off before I can use it?
Likewise, I was confused about the murders. Fred Samples had been killed in his truck. The food inspector had been killed in her office. Yet apart from the method, the two killings seemed unrelated, only in that the inspector gave out licenses for the trucks. Sample had never had any trouble getting his license. Only my aunt had struggled with that.
I decided that I would start sorting the threads of this case, the same as I sorted the ingredients for each condiment. Land kept all the ingredients for the relish together, even if it meant he had two sets of pickles. He kept all of the mustard ingredients together. In that way, he could see what was available and what was needed.
I decided to do the same with the clues. I would group them by who benefited. In that way, I could learn more about what evidence was there and what needed to be filled in. I hoped that it would work but I was at loose ends here. I was without a truck for one more day and my idea of fun during my free time was cleaning someone else’s truck.
That night I started to organize the things I’d learned into three sets of facts: the facts about my truck and the attempts to keep it out of business; the facts about the possible murder of Shirley and my aunt; and the facts about Meat Treats and their luring Land away from me. I tried to be organized about the matter, using different index cards to represent differing interests and motives, but in the end, what I ended up with were three stacks of attractive looking cards. I was no closer to solving this than I’d been when I started.
One thing I had noticed was that the last attack on me had come after Land was out of my truck. Perhaps Fred’s death had resulted from the desire to create a position for Land, so that I would be alone in the early mornings and a vulnerable target. It didn’t make a lot of sense, since it fell into the same pattern of giving me the truck and taking it away, but at least I’d made it into some sort of pattern.
I finally gave up, had a cup of tea and read a book. TV wasn’t even worth watching since I’d likely watch a crime drama where the actors figured out who the killer was in less than 48 minutes. I couldn’t do it in more than a week.
Before I went to bed, I got a call from the police telling me that the food truck had been released from the crime lab. The clerk who called didn’t have anything to tell me about the attack or what they’d discovered. She knew nothing about the shell casings or the gun, just that I could pick it up tomorrow morning after 9 a.m.
I sighed and looked at the time. It was nearly 10 p.m., which meant that I should have gone directly to bed. Unfortunately, the last minute change of plans left me unable to sleep. I had to pick up the truck, take it somewhere to clean. I wasn’t sure if it still smelled like smoke or not, but I wanted that scent out of my truck before I had to spend a whole day in there. Nothing would set my nerves on fire faster than having to be reminded that someone had taken shots at me through the door of the truck.
Once I’d cleaned up after my attempt at deduction, I hit the sheets. Mostly my dreams were about being chased. Some of my pursuers wanted to shoot me, while others just wanted to chop my head off. I got some exercise that night in my sleep, even though I never left the bed.
I woke up the next morning feeling drained. I was dragging by the time I made it to the impound lot. The police had not returned the truck to me, which would have been nice, but apparently unheard of. I signed papers for 45 minutes regarding my ownership of the truck and release forms about the state of the vehicle.
I had decided to do my clean-up work at my old site on Elm. I didn’t know of many places where I could park the truck and scrub things down. My only options were the secured lot where I kept the truck, or its usual parking space. The secured lot had no facilities for water or outlets, so I parked on Elm Street a little after 11 a.m. I kept the windows down so that the customers would know that I wasn’t open yet.
I could see Meat Treats down the block, and it looked like Land was doing a great business. There was a crowd around the truck and I recognized a few of those customers as mine. I felt myself growing angry as I thought about all the business I’d lost over the past few days and how all of the additional foot traffic I’d picked up from using the Meat Treats location would have been lost during the imposed break.
I started by cleaning up the debris left from
the bullets. There were broken pieces of cookware and kitchen utensils that I discarded first. I kept a list of what I needed to replace now, and what I could wait to replace once Dogs on the Roll was operational again. The list was not long.
Following that, I threw away all of the ingredients and food that had been left out for three days. None of it would be any good, and I’d have to start from scratch for the condiments. Nothing would be salvageable. Fortunately, the refrigeration unit hadn’t been affected so the goods in the cooler were still good.
I scrubbed the walls and the floor of the truck. I could still see the holes in the doorframe as I cleaned. It unnerved me at times, but I figured that keeping busy would be the most helpful thing I could do. I’d have to get used to being in here again, and being in here by myself. Cleaning gave me a reason to be here and get used to things again.
By 3 p.m., I was about done. I opened the door to look down the street, but Land was already gone from his location. I figured that he knew I wouldn’t be there to help since I had my own truck back. Honestly, I was going to miss him. He was surly and mean at times, but it was nice to share a busy day with someone so you could process what happened and reflect on how to improve the business. I’d be doing that all alone now.
I checked the time on my phone and noticed that I had missed three calls from John Summers, the handwriting analyst. His messages sounded as if he was somewhat rattled. He stumbled over his words, not the usual suave tone I’d expected. His messages had the same effect on me. I looked around at all the hard work I’d just done and wondered, not for the first time, if I was going to lose this food truck to someone else.
MURDER TO GO (Food Truck Mysteries Book 1) Page 12
