Frying The Knot (Patty Cakes Bake Shop Cozy Mystery Series Book 4)

by Holly Plum

  “I don’t think anyone was expecting a murder,” Mari commented.

  “Well, that’s what happened. And now the rest of us are going to have to deal with it.”

  Mari felt unprepared to handle the subject of death. One minute Steve was alive and then he was gone. Mari wondered if the dead body at the back of the restaurant could have been hers. Even her father, for all his mercenary considerations, stared soberly through the window of his office into the dining room as though contemplating his own mortality.

  Mari felt the regret that came from knowing she could have treated the dead with more kindness. Dating Steve Wilson was never an option, but she remembered all the times she and Alex had laughed about him and called him names behind his back. Even the fact that she had fed him a meal that morning didn’t make up for it.

  As if the situation wasn’t already frightening enough, there was the possibility that Steve had been murdered by someone she knew. The police were treating the case as a criminal investigation. They would probably press charges. But against whom? Who did Mari know that could be a killer? Mateo had been with her the whole time. Her dad had been in his office, and in any case, he wasn’t a killer.

  Who did that leave?

  An officer whose dark uniform seemed too tight for his large belly came toward them. His hair was graying at the edges, and his eyes were small and beady. The loose network of red veins running around their edges looked like the map of a city. He coughed as he approached.

  “I'm Detective Price,” the man said, extending one hand to Mari and then to her father, who shook it in turn. “I’ll need to interview both of you separately. You can decide which of you wants to go first. Also, can I borrow your office, Mr. Ramirez?”

  Mr. Ramirez seemed less than enthusiastic about having to relinquish his private space, but Detective Price didn't wait for his permission. Mari chose to go first. The detective followed her into the office and closed the door.

  “How long had you known the victim?” he asked when they were both settled.

  “Since college,” Mari said. “He was a few years older than me, but we met while I was working here during the summers to put myself through school. He asked me out once. I don’t think he had ever had a girlfriend.”

  “And you made it clear you weren’t interested?”

  “Yes, not that it stopped him from trying,” Mari answered.

  “Can you elaborate?” The detective waited.

  “Oh, nothing huge. He would just find ways to do nice things for me. Flowers left in my dad’s office. Chocolates. Framed photographs. You know...”

  “But you wouldn’t describe his behavior as threatening or stalker-like,” the detective added

  “No, he was harmless,” Mari answered honestly.

  “What did the rest of your family think of him?”

  “They often made jokes about him,” Mari confessed, feeling the guilt churning in her stomach.

  “What kind of jokes?”

  “Not so nice things. Please, don't make me say them. I feel bad enough about it now that he's dead.” Mari felt the heat rising into her face.

  "Fair enough," Detective Price agreed. “Tell me about your dad, Ms. Ramirez.”

  “What about him?” Mari tilted her head curiously,

  “What did he think of the victim?” The detective waited in earnest, studying Mari's every movement.

  “Honestly, he didn't think much of Steve. I mean, he's messed up our meat orders more than once. Hopefully, it isn't a rude thing to say about him but Steve wasn't that great at his job."

  Mari was getting flustered and feared she wasn’t fully in control of her senses. She also couldn’t help noticing how determined Detective Price was to bring the subject back around to her dad.

  “But your father,” he said. “Did he ever express frustration towards the victim? Anger? Did he ever lash out at him?”

  Mari shook her head, struggling to keep her composure. “He would mumble things under his breath. That was as mean as he ever got.”

  “What kinds of things?” the detective asked.

  “One time he called him a big banana head when Steve locked the keys to the freezer inside the freezer. Honestly, he could’ve said a lot worse.”

  “Was Steve what you would call a jokester?”

  “Not particularly," Mari answered. "The whole key thing was an accident.”

  “Was he clumsy? Accident-prone?” The detective jotted a few things down.

  “In the extreme,” Mari said. “We used to joke that he wouldn’t know which shoes to put on which feet if someone didn’t write it down.”

  “Did someone write it down?”

  “No, it was just a joke.” Mari wrinkled her nose, annoyed by the detective's questions.

  “Did Steve ever show signs of depression?” Detective Price continued.

  Mari had to think about that one. “Not around me. I guess if I were him, I would’ve been depressed, just because of the nature of my life, you know? But if he was, he never showed it.”

  “What did the other staff members think of him?”

  Mari shook her head slowly. “You would have to ask them.”

  Detective Price had kept his attention studiously fixed on his notepad throughout the interview. As Mari watched him writing, a new thought occurred to her. “We are talking about a murder here, aren’t we? Not a suicide?”

  “Ms. Ramirez,” the detective replied, setting down his pen and paper and looking at her directly for the first time. “At this moment, I honestly don’t know, and I think it would be useless to speculate. A few hours ago a man was found dead in the back of your restaurant, a knife sticking out of his back. Obviously, given the manner of his death, suicide seems unlikely. But that leaves us with the other possibility, the one that no one here wants to face, or admit to.”

  "What's that?" Mari asked.

  "That a murder has taken place at your family's restaurant," Detective Price answered, "and my leading suspect is your father."

  CHAPTER THREE

  David and Alex finally showed up for work two hours later. Neither of them had a convincing explanation for where they had been. They were both surprised to learn that a murder had taken place at the restaurant in their absence.

  “This is your fault,” José Ramirez shouted, as the two brothers stared at the bloody floor. “If you’d been here when you were supposed to be, no one would’ve died, and we wouldn’t be losing an entire day’s worth of business.”

  “Sorry,” David answered. “Me and Alex were…”

  Silence fell over the restaurant as everyone waited for David to conclude the sentence. After this had gone on for two or three minutes, Mr. Ramirez shoved his hands into his pockets. And with a disgruntled snort, he returned to his back office.

  By now, news of the murder had spread throughout the small town. Steve Wilson had no family to speak of, and no friends. Yet, everyone in town had a story about the time they had run into him stocking the freezer section of the local grocery store or beaten him at poker, or found him ripping apart a whole loaf of bread to feed to the geese that ran through Birchwood Park. A spontaneous crowd had gathered in the street between Lito Bueno’s Mexican restaurant and the Lucky Noodle, singing songs and looking solemn. An old woman to whom Steve had been especially kind had arranged rose petals in the shape of a beef steak. Inside the petals the townsfolk placed candles and pennies, and anything else they thought might convey their respects. Steve Wilson had turned out to be more popular in death than he had ever been in life.

  “I don’t get it,” David said, watching the scene through the window. “A man dies, and suddenly everyone pretends they were his best friend. I just don’t get it.”

  “He was murdered,” Alex added. “No one likes to admit it, but everyone loves a good murder.”

  “Is there such a thing?” David wrinkled his nose.

  No one replied. Mari was getting restless having to wait here while the police conducted their inve
stigation; she wanted to leave, but Detective Price had asked them to stay until they had finished their preliminary interviews. Her interview hadn’t gone well. From the moment she entered the back office, it was like she was in a tunnel, and all she could think about was murder and the possibility that one of them might be arrested. Mari knew that Detective Price was just doing his job, but she resented his intrusive questions about Steve’s private life, about their relationship with each other, about her father. Again and again, the conversation had returned to her father.

  When she came out of the restroom shortly after the interview ended, Detective Price and his colleague Officer Penny were standing near the door still talking about him.

  “It’s too soon to make an arrest,” said the detective. “But we may have a suspect. We can verify that José, his daughter, and Mateo the bus boy were all in the restaurant at the time of the murder. And while Marisol Ramirez and Mateo were apparently together, no one can verify the whereabouts of Mr. Ramirez.”

  “You don’t think he was in his office?” Officer Penny asked.

  “He may have been," Detective Price said quietly. "He says he was. They say he was, but we don’t know. It won’t be enough to convict him in court, but it is a lead. The only other possibility is that he was attacked by a fourth person that the three of them did not know was in the restaurant.”

  Mari did not think her anger could burn any brighter, but then Officer Penny said, “I don’t think we should be so quick to rule out Mari and Mateo. We’ve seen this kind of murder before, where two people give each other an airtight alibi at the time of the crime, but it turns out that they were both guilty.”

  “I thought of that,” Detective Price responded. “And I’m not trying to discount it, but it’s hard to look at those two and think they could be that clever.” He paused for a moment before adding, “Plus, while Mari was obviously not enamored of the victim, she doesn’t strike me as harboring any particular hostility toward him.”

  “But we’ve seen that before, too,” Officer Penny replied, who Mari desperately wished would stop talking. “Maybe she doesn’t appear suspicious at the moment because she took all her anger out on Steve Wilson?”

  ***

  Later that night in her apartment, Mari warmed up some shrimp tostadas and paced the kitchen trying to sort out what she knew.

  Two things had struck her as suspicious. First, Mateo had shown up to work early. And second, Alex and David had shown up late. Mari didn’t for a moment think that her brothers had been involved in the murder—they hadn’t even been at the restaurant, as far as she knew—but she needed to know where they had been. The fact that Mari's brothers had been so evasive when she had asked them about their whereabouts only confirmed that they were up to something sketchy.

  Mari gave Tabasco the remains of her meal and sank into the couch. A colorful blanket decorated with red, blue, and green patterns lay draped over it. Mari pulled the colorful blanket over her tired body. Now that the passions of the moment had subsided, she could admit to herself that she didn’t know where her dad had been at the time of the murder. It was an unpleasant fact of the case that Mari didn’t want to think about, but she had to.

  She had to clear her family's name.

  José Ramirez was an unlikely suspect. The only person he really hated was Mr. Chun across the street. If Mari's father were going to murder anyone, it would have been him. The whole town knew that. Honestly, there weren’t any likely suspects. Nobody hated Steve Wilson enough to want him dead. No one particularly thought about Steve at all. He was just there, like the elms in Birchwood Park. Steve had been a fixture in the community for as long as anyone could remember, pleasantly smiling and bland, not especially threatening or intelligent. Just there.

  Steve had no family in town, but he must have had family somewhere. Mari would start there. She would find out where his parents lived if they were still living and contact them. Mari would talk to Steve's siblings if he had any. Maybe finding out his family history would illuminate his unfortunate end.

  And, just because it was bothering her so much, Mari would talk to her brothers. She picked up her cell phone to call them when the phone began ringing. It was Mari's father.

  “Hola, dad,” said Mari answered.

  “I know you don’t have plans tonight, so don’t say you do,” Mr. Ramirez responded. “I need you to get back here.”

  “Back to the restaurant?”

  “We’re opening for dinner," he clarified. "Be here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Dad, are you even allowed to be opening?" Mari questioned. "Did the police say you could do this?”

  There was no answer because José Ramirez had already hung up.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Mari’s prediction from that morning had proven correct. Lito Bueno’s Mexican Restaurant was seeing its best business in years. When she pulled up to the restaurant ten minutes after getting off of the phone with her dad, a group of teenagers was playing hacky sack in the last open parking space. Mari yelled at them to move, even threatening to run over them, but they remained fixed.

  Not wanting to cause a scene, Mari drove across the street to the Lucky Noodle, whose parking lot was also beginning to fill up. The restaurant itself, however, was virtually empty. Whole families were abandoning their cars and dashing back across the street to Lito Bueno’s Mexican Restaurant. Mr. Chun stared enviously through the slatted blinds of his Chinese restaurant at the long line that snaked its way out of the dark lobby and halfway around the building.

  Ignoring the flashes of the photographers and the shouts of customers who thought she was cutting in line, Mari cut her way through the crowd, past the foyer, and into the kitchen. There she found Alex and David washing pans. Her brothers had been given the least glamorous of jobs and would be working late to make up for the hours they had missed that morning. Chrissy Davenport, the sprightly young waitress, blonde and bubbly, was just beginning her shift. She hadn’t known about the murder until Mr. Ramirez had called her into his office. Chrissy hadn’t had a chance to talk about it with anyone else, and so spent several minutes questioning Mari about the discovery of the body and her subsequent interrogation.

  “Like, what did they ask you?” Chrissy said, who seemed to find the whole thing wonderfully thrilling. “Did it feel like you were being treated as a suspect?”

  “They wanted to know where I was and who I was with when it happened, really basic stuff,” Mari replied. “I didn’t have much to say. I just explained to them that I had been hanging out back with Mateo until Tabasco started barking, and would not stop. I came out here to get him, and you know the rest.” Mari found she didn’t want to dwell on the unsavory details that would undoubtedly be endlessly repeated in the newspapers and local gossip.

  “You brave soul, you must have been so scared, finding the body like that,” Chrissy commented. “I can’t believe…” She glanced around to make sure no one could hear her, and then leaned forward and whispered, “I can’t believe you’re working tonight after what you went through today.”

  “Neither can I,” Mari said with a shrug. “But that’s life. The world doesn’t stop just because someone dies, you know?”

  “You’re so brave,” Chrissy said again, shaking her head in wonder. “Your true love was killed, practically in front of you.”

  “We weren’t lovers." Mari rolled her eyes. “And I didn't see anything. You're being a bit dramatic.”

  “He was smitten with you,” Chrissy went on, seeming not to hear her. “It’s going to be strange not seeing his meat truck driving through town every day.”

  Mari was relieved when the doors to the restaurant opened and Chrissy no longer had the time speculate about Mari's love life. The table where Steve had been sitting that morning had been roped off, and a sign placed near it asking customers not to go near it. So, of course, children and even a few adults had tiptoed over the rope and had touched the once blood-stained chair as though it was a holy rel
ic. Mari felt it would have made more sense to hide the chair and then rope off a completely different table, pretending it was the scene of the crime. Customers would have the grim pleasure of thinking they were sitting at the victim’s table, and her dad wouldn’t have to come out every few minutes and shoo them away, looking more and more grumpy each time.

  About a hundred people were seated in the dining room at one time, while another hundred waited in the lobby or stood in line outside. For a while, Chrissy busily sat people on the long Spanish-style benches by the front doors as they waited for the line to move forward. Eventually, Chrissy ran out of spaces and instead began urging the crowd, in the loudest and sternest voice she could muster, to leave the seats available for the pregnant and elderly.

  Of course, there was one man who couldn’t be bothered to stand in line. Mr. Chun from the Lucky Noodle strode in from across the street and, ignoring the cries and protests of waiting customers, planted himself at the front of the line and demanded a seat.

  “I’m very sorry,” Chrissy patiently said, who was so taken aback by this presumptuous gesture that she didn’t know how to respond. “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait in line like everyone else.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Mr. Chun replied, a single vein in the middle of his forehead throbbing dangerously. “If I wait, it will take at least an hour to be seated.”

  “Two hours,” said Chrissy.

  “I want a table and I want it now.”

  Chrissy assured Mr. Chun that she would see what she could do. A few minutes later, she returned wearing a sober expression, her lips pursed into a frown.

  “I’ve spoken to the manager,” Chrissy said. “I’m afraid we won’t be able to seat you at all tonight.”

  “This is ridiculous," Mr. Chun shouted, slamming his fist down hard on the wooden podium. Chrissy and several customers jumped. “This is an outrage!”

  “I’m sorry, those are my orders,” said Chrissy. Then, addressing the crowd, she said in a loud voice, “I’ve been asked to let you know that only those who are currently inside the building will be seated tonight. The rest of you will have to return tomorrow.” Turning back to Mr. Chun, she said in a faint voice, “That includes you, Sir.”