* * *
“Where the heck have you been?” Vinton demanded to know when I walked into Risko Realty an hour later. “All hell has been breaking loose around here!”
I stopped short. There was no nutmeg, but the windows were wide open, water was on the floor near the coffeemaker, and Juda’s right hand was bandaged up. The door to Charlie’s old office was open, and Tanya’s desk had been moved to the center of the room where she could see and be seen by others. When she saw me come in, she gave me a desperate wave. I could see she’d been crying, not surprising for a young woman recently widowed, even one married to Charlie Risko.
“Mrs. Jones, everything is going wrong!”
“You want me to close the door?”
She vigorously shook her head. “That’s what Charlie did. I want to be close to everybody outside.”
I noticed all the chairs had been moved around. I settled down in one of the plush ones, and she continued. “Seems almost like Charlie is still here, getting even with us. First, the coffeemaker blew up. That’s why all that water is on the floor. Then the carbon monoxide alarm went off, and we had to call the fire department and everybody had to go outside and leave the windows open, then Juda tripped on the rug and hurt her thumb and had to go to the emergency room, and then . . .” She gestured for me to move closer, then whispered, “I’m scared that everybody thinks I killed him.”
I let her words linger, then innocently asked, “Why would they think something like that?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her eyes wide. “Maybe it’s because of me and Dennis, or maybe because of... you know, me and Harley.”
“Harley?” I didn’t hide my surprise.
“I talked to him, and I know they arrested him.”
So much for keeping Harley’s secret. “What else did he say? ”
“That he trusted you. That he was sorry. Sorry about everything.”
“Everything meaning what?” I asked.
She shrugged, as if she didn’t know or didn’t want to talk about it. I gave her the benefit of the doubt because she seemed at this moment as young as she and Louella had been in those old photographs.
Dennis walked in, breaking into any further conversation we might have, making me wonder about his timing. Was the choice of an open door his or hers? “Mind if I sit in on this?” he said. Avoiding my eyes, she shook her head.
“I don’t think there’s much to sit in on, Dennis,” I said with a forced, lopsided grin. I’m not a good liar but hoped my fake smile would hide it.
“So what were you-all talking about then?” he asked, not letting her—nor me—off the hook, which left me wondering just what he didn’t want me to hear. “This whole open-door thing is a mistake, Miss Lady, you know that, don’t you?”
It was her idea, after all.
Tanya visibly squirmed before melting into the kittenish girl that always served her well. I remembered those bruises that covered her arms.
I studied Dennis Lane, taking his measure and recalling what Harley had said about Charlie being a rich boy playing at being tough, but that Dennis Lane was the real thing, the one you had to look out for. Where was the glimmer when I needed it? Absent as usual.
“We were just talking about my new business venture,” I said. Tanya glanced at me and nodded. I realized she was afraid of him.
“Can I be part of this business venture? Anything to do with business, I’ll be helping Tanya out. She’s new to the business world, and I’ve been around for quite a while.”
I’ll bet you have, I thought, and gave a dimpled grin. “Well, I don’t know if you were aware of this, Dennis, but I am expanding my catering service. And Tanya has offered—”
“Catering?” he asked, as if he’d never heard the word before.
“You know, cooking.” I snuck a look at Tanya, who nodded as if she knew what I was talking about. “Anyway, I wanted to try out some new recipes on the staff, and Tanya said that was fine. I’m going to bring a dessert sample over to her place tonight and to anyone else who would be kind enough to have me drop by,” I added.
“As long as it’s not going to be in the office. Mrs. Risko doesn’t want this place smelling like a bakery.”
“No,” Tanya said, her voice firm. “Tonight is good, Mrs. Jones. Around eight? I love chocolate. Can you make something chocolate?” She avoided looking at Dennis, hinting there were things she didn’t want him to hear. She wasn’t a chocolate-chip-cookie kind of girl after all.
“Did I hear the word chocolate?” Vinton called from his cubicle.
“Close the door behind you when you leave,” Dennis said. “You got to keep that door closed. We don’t want everyone to hear your business.”
“Fresh baked? Anything I want?” Vinton said when I returned to my cubicle.
“Right from the oven. D&D Delights is my part-time job. I’m trying to build up my client list. If I don’t drop my desserts off, I end up eating them myself.”
“Why don’t you just bring them in here?”
“Dennis said Tanya doesn’t want me bringing anything into the office. It’s a workplace, not a bakery.”
“Yeah, well, that’s Dennis trying to be Charlie. His attitude must come with the territory, if you know what I mean.” Vinton gave a lecherous wink I chose to ignore. But I wondered if new bruises would become part of that territory, too.
“Just give me your order and address and the date you want them. Has to be in the next few days, though.”
“Home-delivered, home-baked goods. Better than Grubhub. I’ll take chocolate chip cookies. I’m definitely in.” Vinton jotted down his information and handed the sheet to Juda. “How about you, Juda? You up for a tea party?”
She shook her head without answering but gave me a quick, surprisingly warm smile that touched me.
“You sure? I only have about five nights open. After that, I have a contract baking for another office group.” Lying was getting easier. Any later than that wouldn’t do me or Harley much good. “Bertie, how about you?” I asked. She had come into the office while I was talking to Tanya.
She didn’t answer at first, rare for Bertie. I wondered if she’d heard me. “You okay?”
“I’m doing fine,” she said, too enthusiastically. “What did you say?”
“I’m going to bring you a dessert from D&D Delights; just tell me what you want.”
“Doesn’t much matter,” she said, then added after a minute, “pound cake would be nice. I used to make them a long time ago, with all that butter and sugar.”
“Maybe something for Louella and Erika. Do they like cookies?”
“Just cake, that’s all.”
“Are they both living with you now?” Maybe things were better with her daughter. The change of her expression told me they weren’t.
“Just Erika,” she snapped.
“What about Louella?”
“She lives wherever she lives,” Bertie said with a forced shrug that told me she cared more than she wanted me to know.
“Give me your address and I’ll drop it off,” I said cheerfully, my cheer as forced as her shrug. Maybe being alone with me in her own space would give us a chance to talk. “Call and tell me when to bring it over so I’ll have time to bake it.”
She nodded, but I didn’t think she’d heard me. Her mind had returned to wherever it had been. Pleased with my progress on the D&D front, I headed home, stopping to get buttermilk, butter, good cocoa powder, and extra baking soda for Tanya’s chocolate cake, along with chocolate chips and walnuts for Vinton’s cookies.
I was sure I’d closed the study door, but the closer I got to home, the more I started worrying about Parker and Juniper.
“Juniper,” I called out as I opened the door, halfway expecting him to bound downstairs with Parker clenched between his teeth. “Juniper, where are you?” I usually don’t have to call him twice, which gave me pause. He came bouncing downstairs, round little belly rocking from side to side, with no Parker in hi
s mouth. But what was he doing upstairs? He usually napped on the living room couch or rug or on the kitchen table when he thought nobody would catch him. I took the stairs, two at a time, and gasped when I got to the top. The door was open. I ran inside, took a breath, and then relaxed. Parker was flying around in his cage, chirping cheerfully. All was well. Juniper, sneaking up behind me, eyed the cage and Parker with a jaundiced cat eye. I must have forgotten to close the door to the room when I left that morning. I couldn’t make that mistake again.
In my rush to get upstairs, I’d left my phone on the kitchen table; the honking duck called me back down. Slamming the door behind me, I ran downstairs to answer it.
“Why are you out of breath?” asked Aunt Phoenix.
“No reason,” I said. If I told her about Parker, I’d have to tell her about Harley.
“I got the numbers for you.”
“They don’t call it the numbers anymore, Aunt Phoenix, they call it the lottery,” I said with a touch of impatience.
“Well, I call it the numbers, but whatever it is, you better play it. It’s five oh four one. By the way, Odessa, remember this: Cats will be cats and birds will be birds,” she snapped before hanging up.
Just what I needed to hear.
I checked the door again; it was still closed. Forgetting about Aunt Phoenix, I began baking Tanya’s cake, a D&D special called the Wickedly Delightfully Decadent Devil’s Food Cake. It sounded just right for a widow who wore red.
Chapter 9
I was sitting in Tanya Risko’s living room eating my Wickedly Delightfully Decadent Devil’s Food Cake (and it was wickedly delicious). I realized when I walked in that this was the room where Harley’s photographs had been taken—same high ceilings, arched windows, polished wood floors. It was an old-fashioned, elegant apartment, probably passed down, like the business had been, from dead father to dead son to dead son, and now it belonged to Tanya. All of it. Yet there was no trace here of her or of Charlie Risko. Everything—couch, coffee table, floor cushions—looked as if it had been plucked and dropped from a Pottery Barn catalog. Tanya, sitting uncomfortably in black velour loungewear on the hard sofa, looked as if she’d been plucked and dropped here, too.
I watched her gobble down her cake, licking the tips of her fingers like a greedy child, and wondered who she really was. One moment she was a little girl, trying hard to please everybody, including me, with her deferential “Mrs. Jones” this and “Mrs. Jones” that, begging to be protected from whatever or whoever threatened her. The next she was the sexy kitten purring and curled up on somebody’s lap—anybody’s lap—if you believed those photographs.
She seemed to have no glimmer at all, nothing like the ones that could be easily read on Vinton or Louella. Yet as Aunt Phoenix said, just because I didn’t see it, didn’t mean it wasn’t there. The glimmer was who I thought a person truly was; that was what counted. I knew nothing about Tanya, not how old she was, where she’d grown up, how long she had worked at Risko Realty, how she was tied to Harley Wilde. I knew from the pictures that she’d been friends with Louella once but not what had happened to that friendship. What did Bertie think of her? She must have known they knew each other. What would she think of those pictures? I remembered Louella’s words the day Charlie was killed, about not wanting to talk before certain people came back. Those certain people were in that photograph, except the one man who stood off by himself.
“I feel like a pig, eating this cake all by myself,” Tanya said as she cut herself another slice. “Aren’t you going to have some more?”
I took a tiny bite. I’d tasted so much batter and frosting during the making, the cake itself was an afterthought. I hadn’t made this one in a while, and my mind strayed to Lennox Royal for an instant. If he thought that 7-UP cake was good, wait until he took a bite of this one. I’d need to call it something different, though, leave out the wicked, decadent stuff. I snapped myself back to Tanya, took another bite.
“Why do you think people believe you killed your husband?” I asked. Her face went blank. “That’s what you said in the office today, don’t you remember?”
She abruptly stood up, brushed imaginary crumbs from her black velour, and went into the kitchen and returned with a quart of milk. “I said all that?” she asked, sitting back down.
“Yes. Because of you and Harley or Dennis, you said. Then Dennis walked in.”
“Oh yeah.” She turned her attention back to the cake. “Did you make it from a mix? Pa Nettie, my pretend grandfather, always used Duncan Hines. He said it was the best.”
“No. Homemade. Why are you scared of him?”
“Who?’
“Dennis.”
“I’m not scared of him or anybody else,” she said with a hint of defensiveness that told me she was lying. “I’ve been scared of only one man in my life and now that man’s dead. I talked to Harley today,” she added, plucking it out of nowhere, then nibbling at the cake like a mouse, bit by bit.
“What did he say?” I took the bait.
She sighed deep, no little girl, no sexy kitten, but straightforward talk, which I hadn’t seen before. “He’s scared. The cops think he killed Charlie.”
“Do you think he did?”
“No.”
“Did you kill Charlie?” The question begged to be asked. Her response surprised me.
“What do you think?” Her eyes turned bright with something I hadn’t seen before. Defiance? Where did it come from?
“I don’t know, but you did say that everyone thought you did.” She looked at me strangely, then gave a full-throated, grown-woman laugh, not the girlish giggle. I laughed with her.
“What would you do if I told you I had?”
“Run out of here as fast as I could!” I passed it off as a joke but wondered if she was telling the truth. Something was gnawing at her. I knew that even without the gift.
“Charlie used to beat me sometimes. Did you know that?”
“I guessed it.”
“Was it that obvious? No, don’t tell me. Mr. Nosy Vinton Laverne, who thinks he knows everything about everyone but doesn’t know squat.”
“I saw the bruises on your arms and back when you took off your jacket at the memorial.”
She nodded slowly, acknowledging the truth. “Harley told me it didn’t do any good to try to cover them up, that I should let the world see them for what they were, but I was too embarrassed. Ashamed.” She smiled a crooked smile that wasn’t one. I’d seen it before on the world-weary, scared faces of the women I’d worked with in the shelter.
“The shame was his, not yours,” I said.
“Yeah, right. But it still hurt like hell. He knocked me around when he got mad, which was all the time. On my legs he used a belt but usually it was his hands. He had big hands for such a small man. Did you ever notice that? Ham hands on a pork chop man. It wasn’t bad at first. I put up with him because of the stuff I got from him. Living here. The clothes. The money. I should have killed him, though,” she added, her voice surprisingly thoughtful.
“But you didn’t.”
“I left it to somebody else to do.”
Her words stayed put, hovering above us, me questioning Harley again, wondering what, if anything, he had to do with Charlie Risko’s death, until she broke the silence.
“I hired a lawyer for Harley so he won’t have to stay in jail until his trial comes. He’s a good one, one of the best in the state. That was one thing Charlie always said: A good lawyer will get you out of anything at all, even if you did it.”
“I’ve heard that, too.” Charlie Risko and Lennox Royal had something in common.
She opened the carton of milk and took a swig. “Harley said some good things about you, Mrs. Jones. Said you got some stuff out of his apartment for him. His mama’s Bible and her stupid bird. His mama didn’t like me much. I didn’t like her much either. I don’t like birds or other people’s mamas, except for one. Louella’s mama. I like her.”
“Do you
know when Harley is getting out?”
“Soon as he can. He doesn’t have any priors. I thought he did, but he didn’t.”
“Why did you think he had priors?”
“Something Charlie said, but he was probably lying. He lied a lot about people.” She yawned, covering her mouth like a child. “All that chocolate must have made me sleepy. Sugar slump, Pa Nettie used to call it.”
“You mentioned Pa Nettie before. He’s your grandfather or father?”
“Pretend grandfather. He wasn’t blood.”
“He must have been a pretty good grandpa, warning about chocolate and baking cakes. Did he raise you up?”
“I guess you could say that. My mother died when I was born. Nobody would tell me how. I figured I must have killed her when I came out because nobody wanted to talk about it.”
“But you don’t know that,” I said, noting the shadow that crossed her face.
“My grandma took me in but she was sick with cancer. Pa Nettie was her boyfriend. My grandma was white like my mother. I think maybe my father was black, but I don’t know. Most people think I’m mixed, but you can’t look at me and tell. Do I look mixed to you? I hope I am so I can have some part of Pa Nettie inside me, even though he wasn’t blood.”
“Everybody is mixed with something, so you’re a little bit of everybody,” I said, and her quick smile told me it was something she needed to hear.
“Pa Nettie being black didn’t sit well with my grandma’s people, so when she died, he took me in because they didn’t want to see me. He raised me the best way he could. Died when I was sixteen, then I was on my own. I think part of me has always been looking for a mama.” I saw a glimmer then but just for a moment, not as powerful as Louella’s but sorrowful. About his death. Memories that still haunted her.
“You were lucky to have him.”
She found and settled into a soft spot on the hard sofa, pulled her feet up, getting comfortable. “Maybe Pa Nettie might have been the start of my thing for old men. They never repulsed me like they do some girls,” she said and chuckled. I thought about that needy child tucked inside her. “After he died, his woman friend was cruel to me. I didn’t mean anything to her and she put me out. Then me and Harley got to be friends. He was the first man near my own age I’d ever been with. Same pretty brown skin like Pa Nettie, which is probably why I fell in love with him like I did. Then he introduced me to Charlie and that was that.”
A Glimmer of Death Page 9
