Add a Pinch of Murder (Angie & Friends Food & Spirits 2)

by Joanne Pence

  He studied the cloth-covered object a moment. “I’m sure it’s nothing, but do you have some kitchen tongs?” he asked. “Long ones.”

  “I do.”

  She found a pair she’d once bought when she tried barbecuing on the roof of her apartment building. She’d forgotten how windy it was up there. The little barbecue was now rusting outside her back door, and the tongs had been relegated to a bottom drawer. She pulled them out and gave them to Joey.

  He went inside her apartment and then, staying right next to the door frame, squatted down. Very carefully he reached into the hall and gripped the edge of the cloth with the tongs. “Stay clear, Miss Angie,” he said, keeping as much of his body inside the apartment with only his arm and the hand holding the tongs exposed to the hallway.

  “I am. Be careful! You’re so brave Joey.” She stood in the doorway of the kitchen and peeked out at him.

  “Yeah, that’s me.” He caught the edge of the dishcloth with the tongs and yanked it into the apartment. They waited.

  When nothing exploded, he peered into the hall. “What the …” he muttered as he stood and stepped out the door.

  He soon returned carrying a water-filled fishbowl into the apartment. In the bowl, floating on the top, was a dead goldfish.

  o0o

  “Look at this,” Yosh placed Ted Redding’s bank statement on Paavo’s desk. Since finding Redding’s body last night, they had concentrated on trying to determine why anyone would have wanted him dead.

  The Kevin Blithe murder was going nowhere fast—Yosh’s meeting with Oliver Cambry’s brother, sister-in-law, and their adult children had yielded nothing—and it felt good to think about a more traditional blood-and-guts murder case for a while.

  “Three times over the past four years,” Yosh said, “this guy made a deposit of nearly twenty grand. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. It seems he was living on welfare and food stamps for the most part. Where’d he get money like that?”

  Paavo picked up the printout. The money didn’t get deposited in any regular period, but whenever the bank account went down to under five hundred dollars, it would get another infusion. “Interesting how he put money in his account as a cash deposit, five thousand at a time, spread over several days.”

  “It’s as if Redding knew some way to get his hands on money—a lot of money—whenever he needed it,” Yosh said. “But how did he do it?”

  “Few legimate businessmen deal with cash in quantities like this,” Paavo said.

  “But we haven’t found anything at all questionable about Theodore Peter Redding,” Yosh insisted. “We’ve got his driver’s license, birth certificate, Social Security, Medicare, and credit cards. He’s clean as a whistle.”

  “Let’s dig deeper. We also haven’t found any friends or family.” Paavo sifted through the evidence. “Wait a second. Here’s something odd. His credit cards were all opened six years ago. Nothing older. The guy’s sixty-eight years old, so how can that be?” Paavo asked.

  He and Yosh looked at each other, and all but simultaneously said, “Let’s run his prints.”

  Moments later, Angie phoned.

  As Paavo listened to her tale of someone getting close enough to her to leave a dead fish at her apartment, he flashed back to when he first met her. At that time, someone had left a pigeon that had been bludgeoned to death at her door. His blood ran cold. His eyes shut as the memory flooded over him.

  He had hurried to her apartment after Rico—or was it Joey?—contacted him. He found her sitting at the dining room table, shocked and frightened. She was pale, her face the sallow-alabaster shade of so many Mediterranean women, devoid of the pink ruddiness of the north. As their eyes met, for the first time, he felt as if he could see straight to her heart. His insides twisted at her look of fear, at the realization that the bold, funny, carefree woman he had met just two days earlier was being systematically beaten down.

  To him, she was small and delicate, as easy to crush as that bird had been. Images he’d seen of what had happened to other women who'd been hunted that way, stalked, tormented, and then captured filled his mind. He had fought to force away the images as he looked at the woman before him. At that moment, he knew he had to protect her, even as he was thankful that she didn't really know, the way he did, exactly what it was she should fear ….

  Now, once again, he found himself trying to push the thoughts away, push away the fear he’d felt back then and that threatened to overwhelm him again. He quietly ended the call and took a deep breath.

  He had since learned she was a lot stronger than he’d given her credit for being, and to his surprise, there had even been times she’d saved him. Who would have thought it?

  And then he remembered something else from that day … how he had, for just a moment, placed his hand on her shoulder in an awkward gesture meant to give comfort. But in that moment he had felt the warmth of her sweater, noticed the fragile delicacy of her bones, and smelled the light, tantalizing scent of roses that always lingered in the air around her. His fingers had tingled from the feel of her as he quickly lifted his hand and tried to make sense out of all that was happening to her.

  Now, he stood and put on his jacket.

  “Paavo?” Yosh called.

  Little did Angie know that even now, his fingers tingled at the feel of her, and her touch made him want to spend his life holding her. He wanted to protect her, to make her happy, to let her know how much he loved her.

  He drew in his breath, needing to stop this sappiness. He needed to focus on what had caused this situation and how to stop it.

  She had managed to put herself into the cross-hairs of someone. He couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to her. If someone was out there leaving her warning messages and dead goldfish, he’d find the S.O.B. and deal with him.

  “Paav, what is it?” Yosh asked.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” With that, he left Homicide and headed for Angie’s apartment.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Paavo had no sooner arrived at Angie’s apartment and saw that she was fine and had Joey with her, than Joey got a phone call from Rico’s wife.

  He looked stunned as he relayed the call. “Rico was attacked outside his apartment,” Joey said. “It took three guys to get him down. They told him it was time to find a new line of work, and then worked him over. Luckily, they didn’t know that hitting that big lug on the head was where they’d do the least damage. His wife says he’s going to be okay, but the doc wants to keep him in the hospital overnight just to make sure.”

  “What the hell’s going on?” Paavo said.

  “I goddamn wish I knew,” Joey muttered.

  “Let’s go see how he is,” Angie said. “And what he has to say.”

  Paavo drove the three of them to San Francisco General.

  Rico was sitting up in bed. His face was bruised and he had a couple of cuts, but other than that seemed all right.

  For the first time, Angie saw his wife. The woman gave Joey a hug to greet him, then turned to her.

  “You’re Angie,” the petite blonde said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  Angie had no idea what she had expected, but it definitely wasn’t a refined woman in her forties or so, with dark brown hair in short pixie cut and no makeup. She wore a white sweater, gray slacks, and her only jewelry was a thin gold cross on a delicate chain.

  “Mrs. Bigelow,” Angie said. “I’m happy to meet you.”

  “Call me Lynn,” she said. “And this has to be Inspector Smith. Rico admires you so much.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Paavo said. “And how is our guy?”

  Rico described the attack as well as the attackers and then agreed to meet Paavo in Homicide to look through mug shots as soon as he was released.

  “I think all this happened because of the Cambrys,” Rico said. “Miss Angie, you and Joey better be careful, too. I don’t want to see neither of you guys end up like this. It ain’t fun.�
�

  “Isn’t,” Lynn said softly.

  “Isn’t fun,” Rico repeated to her. “I’m tough, and so’s Miss Angie. But I worry about Joey. He’s got a soft head. And a glass jaw.”

  “Like hell,” Joey said. “That beating affected your brain.”

  “At least I got one to be affected,” Rico said. “Seriously, you guys need to watch yourselves. I know something not so good is going on in that Cambry house. Right, Inspector?”

  Paavo put his arm around Angie’s shoulders. “I’ll keep an eye on them until you’re on your feet again.”

  “And I guess,” Angie said, “I’d better call Madrigal and let her know what happened. After all, she is your client. I agree with Rico—all this has to be about her and her family.”

  o0o

  Rico was released from the hospital the next morning, and his wife drove him straight to Homicide. Joey and Angie were already there, along with Paavo and a book filled with mug shots. Paavo explained to Angie last night that there was a good chance that the three attackers were hired muscle to warn him away—especially since Rico hadn’t been badly hurt, similar to the way the dead goldfish and “Keep away” note had been meant to frighten and warn her off. Ironically, that took finesse and was the kind of thing an amateur would botch, either being too heavy-handed and killing the victim, or being too soft and letting the victim get the upper hand.

  Paavo hoped that at least one of the three, if not all, had prior arrests and were in the system.

  Rico went through the mug shots and identified two of the three people who jumped him, Denny White and Chris Davis. Both men had long criminal records, and had done time.

  “Now that I’m looking at these guys,” Rico said, “I’m wondering about the third guy. I never got a good look at him. He hung back, standing in a dark doorway. I saw him step out, but next thing I knew, I was waking up in the hospital. Something about the way he stood and watched made me think maybe he was the one who hired the other two.”

  “It’s not too often someone who hires others gets involved himself. Those guys like to keep their hands clean,” Yosh said.

  “Unless he’s a complete novice,” Paavo said. “We’re not exactly dealing with crime lords here.”

  “Do you have photos from the gala we were at, Paavo?” Angie asked. “If he’s the one who hired the attackers, he might have been there when Kevin Blithe was poisoned.”

  “Not only photos but security videos. Let’s have a look.”

  Since it would take a while to go through the videos, Angie called for pizza. They had to forgo the beer, but she ordered “ginger” beer and a variety of soft drinks, plus coffee, to keep Rico focused on looking at the videos. She had learned that the best way to keep her bodyguards happy at their jobs was with food.

  There were three security cameras, all filming from different angles, and the gala had gone on for two hours before Blithe was killed. They were into the third hour of reviewing video tapes when Rico said, “That guy, I think that might be him. But I can’t be sure. Like I said, I never got a good look at him.”

  Rico pointed to a man of average height, with light brown hair, curly but short. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, had a broad forehead, but thin, sunken cheeks. His expression was between a smirk and a sneer as he looked across the ballroom. They couldn’t tell what he was looking at from the angle of the video.

  Neither Paavo nor Angie had any idea who the man was.

  “I know how to find out,” Angie said. She took a picture of the man Rico had identified and texted it to Madrigal with the simple question, “Can you tell me this man’s name?”

  It didn’t take long before Madrigal replied. “His name is Harlan Yarborough.”

  Paavo went to work trying to find out anything about Yarborough. He was one of the people who filled out a sheet with contact information. Yosh had questioned him by phone, but nothing had stood out. He was wealthy, connected, and attended a number of charitable events in the city. He said he hadn’t seen anything involving Kevin Blithe until he heard people shouting and saw Blithe on the floor.

  Paavo phoned the number listed, but there was no answer. He didn’t leave a message. “We’ll have to pay him a visit,” he said to Yosh.

  While Paavo tried to reach Yarborough, Angie gave Madrigal a call. She had told her earlier about Rico’s attack. “Can you tell me anything about Harlan Yarborough?” Angie asked. “How is he connected to your family?”

  “Why?” Madrigal asked.

  “He’s just one of many people the police are looking into.”

  “Humph! I doubt he would hurt Kevin, but I will say that I never liked him. He was always hanging around my stepmother. If I were a suspicious person, I would have wondered about the way those two looked at each other. I didn’t care for it at all.”

  “You thought they were having an affair or something?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past either one of them.”

  “Do you know anything about Yarborough? Where he lives? Where he works? How he knew your parents?”

  “She wasn’t a parent. I don’t know where he lives or anything else. He was a hanger-on. There are plenty of people like him around wealthy people like my father. Yarborough always showed up at parties and always hung around Farlee. I don’t think my father cared for him at all. And I find him disgusting at best.”

  “Okay. Well, if you think of anything more, give me a call. And if he comes around to see you, definitely call.”

  “He won’t. If he did, I wouldn’t let him in my house whether you had called about him or not. But for now, I need to get ready for Kevin’s funeral. I hope you’ll be there, Angie.”

  Angie had forgotten that the funeral was that afternoon. If she had, she certainly wouldn’t have bothered Madrigal with this. But now, she felt doubly bad that she hadn’t planned on going. She took a deep breathe. “Of course I’ll be there.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you expect Harlan Yarborough will attend?”

  “I have no idea,” Madrigal said.

  Angie soon ended the call and relayed her conversation to Paavo and Yosh.

  “Yosh and I were going to take a look at the people who attend Kevin Blithe’s funeral,” Paavo said. “But since you’ve become friends with Madrigal, why don’t I go with you? That’ll give me an opportunity to talk to a lot of these people. Yosh can keep an eye on the outskirts. Some killers like seeing the results of their handiwork by attending funerals; others by watching the attendees.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Angie was surprised at the number of people at Kevin Blithe’s funeral, especially since it seemed Madrigal hadn’t done anything to prepare for it. But then she realized that the attorneys, estate controllers, and others who had worked for Oliver Cambry now worked for Madrigal. They must have taken care of everything.

  The gathering wasn’t at the grave site itself, but in a large elaborately furnished room festooned with what seems like acres of flowers where people could sit in luxurious comfort and contemplate the deceased. Most of the attendees, however, spent their time standing and talking to each other. Angie couldn’t help but shudder as she looked at the puffed pastry wrapped hors d’oeuvres—the same type of hors d’oeuvres as served at the party where Kevin had died. Did someone have a droll sense of humor? At least, Angie thought, they weren’t serving champagne with them.

  A number of the same people Angie had seen at the gala reception were now at the funeral, but she was surprised to see her sister Frannie and Frannie’s husband, Seth Levine. Angie was once again appalled at Frannie’s frizzy hair-style. She probably thought she looked hip and cool, but instead she looked like someone stuck in the 1970’s. Considering that was before Frannie was even born, it was rather unnerving.

  Seth was frowning as Angie approached. To Angie’s eye, he was average in every way except that he was already losing his hair. It was light brown, but the way he wore it slicked straight back made it look practically nonexistent.

/>   “Hello, you two,” Angie said.

  “I thought you’d be here,” Frannie said. “I’ve heard that you’ve become friends with Madrigal.”

  “You have?” Angie was stunned. “Who told you that?”

  “Everyone is talking about it. They think you’re going to use her to set you up in a restaurant to call your own.”

  Angie was both horrified and furious. “You have got to be kidding. Anyone who knows me knows the last thing I want is to own a restaurant. I don’t even want to work in one—or eat in most of them. That kind of work is a commitment that takes over your life completely. What nerve of these no-nothing, gossiping people. You need to tell everyone that the story is nonsense and insulting. Good Lord, what with my upcoming wedding, I’m far too busy to be tied down with a restaurant job.”

  “Calm down,” Frannie urged. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  Angie tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “I didn’t know anyone was so interested in me.”

  Frannie rolled her eyes. “I didn’t either, frankly. But nonetheless, I had to check with you. Sometimes, the sister is the last to know.”

  Angie shook her head. Why she ever bothered to talk to Frannie was beyond her. “So, what do you think of all this? I’m stunned to see such a crowd,” Angie said.

  “You, of all people should understand why,” Seth said with a scowl. It was clear this was the last place he wanted to be.

  “I should?” Angie asked.

  “Look, Kevin was poisoned,” Seth said in his pretentious “you-are-too-dumb-to-live” voice. “Everyone assumes whoever did it was at the gala. As a result, everyone present was afraid that if they didn’t show up here, the police might find the absence suspicious. I know for myself, I don’t want anyone to think there was some nefarious reason Frannie and I didn’t attend—such as we paid someone to kill Kevin. Why else would we be here now? We didn’t even like the guy.”

  “You didn’t? I thought he was well-liked by most people,” Angie said.

  “Of course people say that.” Frannie sneered as if Angie should know better.