“Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Back in my medicine cabinet with my Dramamine. I can’t take all these curvy roads. We’ve passed a dozen restaurants already.”
“Just up ahead. The place on the right.”
I put on my blinker and pulled into the dirt parking lot. The lot was filled with cars. I glanced at the restaurant. It was blue with red trim and had phony windows painted onto the cinderblocks. I looked up at the large white-and-black plastic sign.
Jack’s Inside Straight?” I read, incredulous. No wonder there were no windows. “This is a bar.” The walls looked uneven, hastily constructed. “And a seedy one, at that.” Denise hadn’t even been drinking at my dinner party. Did she have trouble with alcohol? That would explain Sam’s instructions for me to keep an eye on her.
She started to get out of the car, but I grabbed her arm. “I don’t like the looks of this place. What does the name mean? Is Jack inside, a heterosexual? Are they directions, as in: ’Yeah, Jack’s straight inside. Can’t miss ’im.’?”
Denise yanked her arm away from me and got out of the car. “They have sandwiches. You can get lunch.” She slammed the door shut. I hurriedly got out of the car and blocked her path. “What’s going on?”
“Oh…well. Truth is, I needed you to drive me here. Sam checks my mileage on the car each day, and if I’m over, he takes the car keys. I’m being held prisoner by my own husband. This is just limited-stakes gambling. It doesn’t hurt anyone.”
“Gambling?” I looked again at the sign; “Inside Straight. That’s a gambling term, right? He should’ve called the place Flush It Down Jack’s Toilet. Royally.”
Denise pursed her lips and brushed past me. She was a small person. I could possibly wrestle her back into the car.
“I get it now,” I said. “All that baloney about your wanting to be treasurer. You wanted access to the PTA funds for gambling money.”
Denise stopped and turned toward me. “Everybody’s cut me off. Sam makes me answer for every nickel of grocery money. I was PTA secretary/treasurer for two years. I paid back every penny I borrowed. Stephanie fired me anyway. Imagine. Fired. From a voluntary position.” She started to go inside. “Don’t worry. I’ve only managed to scrape together twenty dollars.”
“This is real cute, Denise. I’d say you owe me one, but you’re way past that point already.”
The interior had red carpeting everywhere: on the walls and floors. It smelled of stale bodies and stagnant cigarette smoke. The staff wore pseudo old-western saloon garb. Denise’s face lit up like a slot machine hitting the jackpot.
“I’m sorry about all of this, Molly. Sam thinks I have a gambling problem.”
“You do.”
“Only when I lose.” She went to a counter, handed the cashier a twenty, and asked for two rolls of quarters, which she expertly broke into a plastic bowl. She gave me a friendly jab on the shoulder. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Go ahead. Get some change. You might just have beginner’s luck.”
I got five dollars in quarters and allowed Denise to demonstrate video poker to me. The machine took up to four quarters a hand. The display showed the five cards you were dealt, and buttons under each card allowed you to choose which cards to hold when a second hand was dealt. A pair of face cards paid your four quarters back. A royal flush earned $2,500.
I played three hands, lost three dollars, and moved on to a slot machine next to Denise. I put four quarters in that machine and won eight. Whoopee. A dollar.
“Some fun, huh, Molly?”
“To tell you the truth, I’d have more fun dropping my money through a street grate. I’m going upstairs for a sandwich. Can I get you anything?”
She shook her head and continued her monotonous motions. Feed the money. Pull the arm. Feed the money. Pull the arm.
The red carpet ended at the top of the stairs. There it was met by unfinished plywood, littered with peanut shells. The rustic walls were decorated by various dead animals. Deer heads. bear heads, antlers, elk head, a deer butt wearing shades. Each corner had a large TV tuned to ESPN. The bartender called to me, “What’s your pleasure?”
“Can I get a sandwich here?”
“Sure thing. I can make that right up for you here.” He gestured at a meat slicer behind him, then slid me a menu. Judging from the wall hangings, I was expecting to see venison, but my choices were ham, turkey, or roast beef. Wanting to take the least chance with food poisoning from his less-than-spotless meat cutter, I told him I was a vegetarian and got a cheese, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.
Denise was still at the same slot machine when I returned. She slipped the last of her quarters into the slot and pulled the handle. “Damn.” She grabbed her wallet. “All I’ve got is one lousy dollar. Get me some change, would you?”
I accepted the dollar from her, but took a step toward the cashier and stopped. I watched a fat woman pouring money into a slot machine. She’d melded with her machine.
“Give me my money!” Denise got off her stool. “I mean it! This machine is gonna blow! I can feel it!”
“But, Denise, you—”
I stopped when I noticed that behind Denise’s back some grungy looking man had fed four quarters into the slot machine Denise had been playing,
Denise followed my gaze and whirled around. She shouted at the man, “Hey, get away from my—”
He pulled the handle as she spoke. “Yes!” he yelled, and quarters started pouring from the machine.
Denise gasped. She whirled toward me, her eyes brimming. She stuck her finger in my face. “I hope you’re satisfied! Now you owe me two hundred and fifty dollars!”
“Here’s your dollar.”
She snatched it from me, then started toward the cashier.
I grabbed her arm. “Listen, Denise. I promised your husband I’d look after you, and it’s time to go.”
“So go. I’ll get a ride home later on.”
The clientele wasn’t composed of anyone I would trust to give Denise a ride, even if I could trust myself to find my way home, which, of course, I couldn’t. “You’re coming with me. Now.”
“Guess again.”
“All right. Denise. Let’s make a bet. If I win the bet, you come with me. If I lose, you stay. Deal?”
“Deal. What’s the bet?”
“I bet that I can make you say the word no.”
“What? What kind of a stupid bet is—”
“It’s just a joke. But I bet I can make you say no!”
“Fine. You’re on.”
“Uh-oh. You’ve heard this one before.”
“No, I—”
“We’re out of here.”
“That wasn’t a fair bet.”
“I don’t care. Deal’s a deal. Let’s go.”
Denise clamped her mouth shut but came without a complaint. As we drove home, she barked out a few instructions and eventually started talking with dreamy eyes of all the close calls she’d had on machines, and how she knew she was destined to win the big jackpot someday.
When I got home, my computer had a message from a potential customer. If I was available and up to the task, she needed an eCard greeting for a neighborhood block party by five o’clock, otherwise she’d go the conventional route and use FaceBook invitations. This was not my usual mode of operation. I had maybe an hour to sketch something out. Still, necessity being a mother and all, it was worth a shot.
After free associating on “meeting neighbors,” I settled for the only one I could live with on such short notice, and rationalized that if she rejected the idea, I’d wasted only an hour: Using my paper trimmer, I cut a thick X from construction paper and temporarily fastened it over the drawing. That way she couldn’t use it without paying me. I scanned my drawing and emailed it to her.
The drawing showed a skinny, monstrous woman with a huge, padlocked nest on her head. Beside her are her two strange sons, and she’s greeting a couple standing in front of a house with a sign that read SOL
D. She says to the couple, “Hi. I’m Cindy, the Locked-Nest Monster, and these are my children, Frank and Stein. Welcome to the neighborhood.”
Moments later, my business line rang. The recipient said, “My husband and I just love it. It’s so clever the way Frank looks like a frankfurter and Stein looks like a beer stein. Was that intentional?”
I rolled my eyes, but said yes. The customer is always right, though not always intelligent. Hadn’t she considered the odds against my having drawn characters named Frank and Stein that accidentally looked like a hot dog and a beer mug?
We arranged payment, and I told them to be sure to put in a good word about me to their friends.
The phone rang again. This could be the all-time fastest job referral.
“Molly. It’s Sam Bakerton. Did…did you have a nice lunch today with my wife?”
“I’m not quite sure how to answer, but the phrase: ‘Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies’ comes to mind.”
“Uh-oh. You went to Jack’s Inside Straight.”
“Right.” And a fine time was had by all.
“I’m sorry. I should’ve warned you. She is getting better. It’s a slow process.”
“Good luck,” That was inappropriate, given her neurosis. “I mean, I hope everything works out for you both.”
“Me, too,” he said. He hung up.
While the children watched television, I scanned the PTA treasury reports.
The bookkeeping records had either a very unfortunate coffee spill across last year’s figures or a nicely placed one. Most of that year’s accounting was illegible. At the start of the spill, the PTA had over ten thousand dollars, and just under nine thousand afterwards. I flipped through the carbon copies of checks written. Many copies had been removed.
I called the credit union and asked the teller to give me the information about the missing checks. I was stunned to learn that they totaled over eight thousand dollars. After frantically explaining my situation as the New PTA treasurer dealing with a potentially bogus set of records, she put a manager on the line.
Fortunately for me, the credit union did not use the same procedures as banks, which return the paid checks to the customer each month. So, after considerable groveling and cajoling on my part, the manager was able to pull the records and locate the actual checks. They had all been made payable to “cash” and were signed Denise Bakerton.
Eight thousand dollars! Denise had gambled away eight thousand dollars of the PTA’s money! Was I going to have to announce this during my treasury report at the next meeting?
“According to my figures, I should have over ten thousand dollars in the account right now. Is that right?”
“That’s correct.”
“So there was over eighteen thousand in this account at some point last year?”
“No, this past summer a deposit covered the exact total of those checks.”
I let out a sigh of relief. Denise had indeed paid back the money she borrowed. “Can you tell me the name of the depositor?”
There was a pause, during which I could hear the soft sounds of paper being shuffled. “Phoebe Kravett.”
Chapter 12
Woe Is Me
At five after eight Wednesday morning, my children were on the bus. The weather was, to use a colloquialism, blechy. The rain clouds looked like dark, lumpy sleeping bags. Apparently they intended to stay for a while. There was no breeze, no break in the gray or the relentless patter of rain on the roof.
All told, it was a perfect day to solve a murder. Indoors, that is.
All the pieces of my puzzle were spread out on the plush gray pile in the living room: my PTA secretary/treasurer’s file, the box of papers Mrs. Kravett’s sister had given me, my school yearbook, a legal pad, and a sharpened number two pencil. Wearing jeans and a CU sweatshirt, with a fuzzy purple-and-blue afghan around my shoulders and a cup of hot chocolate in hand, I sprawled out on the floor as well.
Atop my chocolate was a dollop of whipped cream. I’ve mastered the technique of sucking through my lips just the right amount of cool cream and steaming chocolate. I luxuriated in the experience as the warm blend slid down my throat, realizing this was as close to a sexual encounter as I was likely to experience anytime soon.
Try as I might, I couldn’t get the last thick dregs to dribble into my mouth. Since Karen and Nathan weren’t here to see me, I licked up the last few drops. So much for romanticizing a beverage.
I set the cup on the coffee table behind me and rubbed my hands together in eager anticipation as I surveyed my stack of clues. Start with the least explored: the box from Mrs. Kravett.
I reread her three-page letter to me detailing how she’d envisioned the criteria for the scholarship program. Then I read the will. Then came the pile of students’ “exemplary work” from the past three years, which, she’d explained in her letter, was when she first got the idea for someday having a scholarship in her husband’s name. This contained the schoolwork and personal histories of some forty-plus students. At first glance, there was nothing that could provide anyone with a motive for murder.
My interest perked up when I started to scan a report written by a student intern named Cherokee Taylor about Saunders and Bakerton Imports, the company owned by my classmates’ husbands. The report touched on what the company did, gave a brief biography of its co-owners, and mentioned that the two men met through their wives, who had been good friends since high school.
Upon a quick read, the paper was not as well written as the others. It was merely a typical high school composition: messy handwriting, poor spelling, weak sentence structure, no plot. I could just imagine Mrs. Kravett handing this back and saying, “This is supposed to be an essay, not a grocery list. Give me something that elicits an emotional reaction.”
Why had she even kept this? I set it aside for a more careful reading later, and pored through the remaining files.
This was getting me no place fast. I decided to jot down some notes of the clues and chronology of events. At the top of the page I wrote, Solution to a Dual Murder. I decided to use Karen’s “lost people” format. I put the names of my dinner guests on the left, and wrote “motive” for the column on the right.
I decided to dismiss the possibility that Steve Wilkins had stormed out of my house with my carving knife, whereupon some person unknown to me stumbled onto the knife and stabbed him with it.
A motive for Lauren was easy. Domestic violence was, sadly, a fact of life. All I could come up with for Jack Vance, Denise, Stephanie, and spouses was that Steve had stumbled onto something in Mrs. Kravett’s data base. Some secret that the guilty party was willing to kill Steve over, rather than let be revealed.
But what type of secret?
Possibly the student intern at Preston and Sam’s company had done a second report, one that turned up some dirt. This was especially feasible since there was all of that bubbling discontent between Jack and those two.
Mrs. Kravett might have had something on Jack that could oust him as principal. He had forced her to retire. Perhaps she’d gathered ammunition prior to acquiescing.
Denise’s gambling debts were being covered by Mrs. Kravett. Steve could easily have stumbled across a memo to the effect that Denise was no longer allowed access to PTA funds. But that didn’t seem like much of a motive for his murder, and Denise’s golden eggs were lost upon Mrs. Kravett’s death. Still, Denise was acting damned suspicious these days.
Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with anything Mrs. Kravett might have had on Stephanie. I racked my brain for a connection between the two women. Stephanie’s daughter was too young to have had Mrs. Kravett as a teacher. Seventeen years ago, Mrs. Kravett had ousted Stephanie as editor for printing the unauthorized front page that contained my poem. But that had played right into Stephanie’s hands. It turned her into an instant student celebrity and got her out of the job she hadn’t wanted in the first place. All of that was such old trivia—pond scum under the bridge.
<
br /> Stephanie was devious, underhanded, selfish. Anything but someone I wanted to write off as innocent. To uncover her motive, I might have to spend more time with her. I’d rather scrub bathtubs.
I jotted down that Carolee knew Mrs. Kravett and enough about medicine that she could have plotted her death. Maybe Steve had come across some evidence in Mr. or Mrs. Kravett’s health history on the school computer that was incriminating to Carolee.
Last, it occurred to me that I could probably rule out the police sergeant entirely as a suspect, but Tommy won points as the only person at the party with absolutely no discernible motive—always the villain of TV murder mysteries. So I logged his possible motives as being in love with Lauren and mentally gonzo after the death of his wife, and/or hoping to glean control of Mrs. Kravett’s money. I then double-checked the will. Sure enough, Tommy was first in line to take my place in the event of my death. That made me his likely victim, not Steve Wilkins, but there may have been some computer file that acted as a codicil.
The doorbell rang. I rose, draped the afghan to hide my project, checked the window, and saw Tommy. I glanced back, verified that the afghan had covered my notes, and opened the door.
“Hey, Moll. Thought I’d drop by.”
“Really? Why?”
He shrugged. “In my line of work, you get used to readin’ folks’ expressions. Guess I was a little concerned ‘bout what yours had to say at Steve’s funeral. Mind if I come in?” He stepped in as he spoke and quickly shed his coat and hat. “Got any more threats lately?”
“No, thank goodness.”
Though I tried to steer him past it, he eyed my suspicious-looking blanketed work.
“The house is a little messy. I was— with the rain, I thought I’d set up an indoor picnic for the kids when they get home.”
“Rather lumpy blanket. Whatcha got under there? Giant ants?”
“What’s a picnic without ’em, right?”
He headed straight toward the afghan. If I tackled him from behind, he’d know for sure I was hiding something. “There’s an Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm underneath the blanket, box and all.”
Death Comes eCalling Page 12
