by Ali Brandon
“It doesn’t make sense,” Darla had agreed, and then hesitated. “Unless . . .”
Unless Doug had been the man that Penelope was supposed to go off on a weekend holiday with, she’d thought with a sudden flash of insight.
The PI, however, was still talking. “With the holiday weekend and all, I doubt the coroner has come back with Livvy’s cause of death yet, but until we know what—or who—killed her and Penelope, I think we all should watch our backs.”
Jake had hung up after that unnerving bit of advice, leaving Darla to wish she’d never thought of a block party in the first place.
By the time she returned to the bakery, the police were already rolling in. Within minutes, a crime scene perimeter had been set, more yellow and black tape hung like grim party decorations from railing to streetlight to railing again. She, James, and Doug were shunted to one side with a street cop as chaperone while they waited to be questioned as material witnesses.
And not long after that, Reese had shown up, Connie again in tow.
Now, Doug walked over from where he’d been talking to Reese. He jerked a thumb in James’s direction. “You’re up next, boss, then Darla. They’re done with me for now, so I’m gonna make a quick run down to the market.”
James unfolded himself from where he’d been sitting on a small concrete bench outside the shuttered Child’s Play shop—they, too, had a “Closed” sign on the door, albeit a more official-looking one than the shoe box lid—and stretched. As he walked past Darla, he murmured, “I fear I will have to tell Detective Reese about George’s enterprise, if you know what I mean. I have a suspicion that there could be a connection between that and these recent deaths.”
“Oh, right,” she murmured back, surprised that she’d already forgotten about that incident. But how could the fake drug scam possibly link the two women’s deaths?
Once James walked out of earshot, Connie lowered her magazine. Looking from side to side, in case she was overheard, she said, “I’ve been questioned by the cops before, Darla, so let me give you some advice. Don’t volunteer nothing. They ask, you answer, the end.”
“That even goes for when it’s Reese, er, Fiorello asking the questions?” Darla wanted to know, smiling just a little.
Connie snorted. “It goes double for him. I swear, that man could pry a whole speech outta one of them street mimes.”
Now, Darla grinned outright. “Well, it is his job.”
“Yeah, his job.” She gave an impatient tsk. “My uncle and two of my cousins are on the force, so I seen it all. I always swore I’d never fall for a cop, but there you go.”
Connie gave a restless glance down at her magazine; then, abruptly, she looked up again, her expression brightening. “I have a great idea. You should be one of the bridesmaids at me and Fi’s wedding!”
“Me? Bridesmaid?”
Darla stared at her in shock. Images of the ugly red dresses and crude photo ops that she and Jake had joked about at the block party flashed through her mind as she tried to decide whether or not Connie was truly serious. Finally, she managed, “That’s a lovely offer, but to be honest, we don’t really know each other. Don’t you want your bridesmaids to be your close friends and relatives?”
“I got twelve bridesmaids already lined up, sisters and cousins,” she replied with a dismissive wave. “The thing is, there’s not anyone from Fi’s side—girls, I mean—who’s gonna be standing up with us. But he’s talked to me about you. He says he thinks of you as an older sister. So I thought it might be fun if you were there. You know, kind of filling in, so he’d be represented. You can be lucky number thirteen!”
Darla barely heard that last bit, however. All that echoed in her mind was the realization that Reese apparently viewed her as a sibling . . . and an older one, at that! There was, what, a year’s difference in age between them? Hardly enough to hang that “older sister” label on her. She could see him thinking of Jake that way, but her?
Connie stared at her expectantly, smile bright. Darla managed a matching smile, though inwardly she still fumed. For a few uncharitable moments, she actually considered agreeing to Connie’s offer. How did that saying go? Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. Then she shook her head. No way was she going to open this can of bridal party worms!
“Thanks, Connie,” she told the other woman. “It’s really sweet of you to offer, but I just wouldn’t feel right being up there at the altar along with all your relatives and friends.”
Connie shrugged. “Suit yourself. But you should know we’ve got some really cute groomsmen lined up. You should see my second cousin, Mario. He’s a looker . . . and single, too!”
Before Darla could respond, she heard James calling her name, so she left Connie to her magazine and got to her feet. As he approached, James said, “Detective Reese is ready to take your statement now.”
“What about you?” she asked. “Can you go now?”
“I am officially dismissed, though he may have more questions for me later.” James gave a lift of his brow, obviously quoting the detective verbatim. “But if you wish, I can wait here for you to finish and then walk you back home again.”
“Thanks, that’s okay. But maybe you could call Steve and Hank for me, and let them know what’s going on.”
James frowned. “It is possible that Detective Reese might want to speak with them, as well. He might prefer that we do not, shall we say, give them a heads-up regarding the current situation.”
“Surely Steve and Hank wouldn’t be considered suspects, would they?”
“I would postulate that anyone and everyone could be a suspect at this point . . . excluding you and me, of course.”
She noticed that he didn’t include Doug among the excluded number. And if her suspicion was correct, that he’d been the man Penelope had been seeing, that would definitely put Doug into the suspect category. Maybe James had already guessed as much, too. That, or he was simply being polite in including her in the “not a suspect” category.
“I tell you what,” she decided, “I’ll ask Reese if it’s okay to talk to them. If he says no, I’ll abide by that. But if he doesn’t care, I’ll give them both a call as soon as I can. I mean, if the situation were reversed, I’d be pretty ticked that no one let me know a friend of mine had been murdered.”
“Agreed. And I shall see you again tomorrow at the store.”
As James headed off and Darla mentally girded herself for the verbal battle to come, Connie lowered her magazine again. “Remember what I said. Don’t volunteer nothing.”
“He asks, I answer, the end,” she replied with a slight smile, obediently finishing the official Connie mantra.
The woman nodded in approval. “Go get ’em.”
Reese was talking to two of the responding beat cops when she approached. Excusing himself, he gestured Darla to follow him around the crime scene tape barrier to the far side of the building. Their route took them right past the open doorway to the doughnut shop.
Darla couldn’t help but glance over. From her vantage point, she could see a portion of the counter. Half a dozen people—crime scene investigators, she guessed from their uniform of coveralls, booties, and gloves—were poking about, their activity thankfully blocking her view of the body near the display case. How quickly they would remove Penelope, she couldn’t guess, but she prayed it would be soon.
The fallen swan should have long since exited stage right.
Reese motioned her to a nearby stoop. They both sat, and he pulled his familiar notebook from his jacket pocket. He hadn’t removed his wraparound sunglasses—the better to frighten those mimes into speech, she wryly assumed—but his tone was off-the-clock Reese as he said, “Two days in a row, Darla? That’s gotta be some kind of record.”
To her mortification, she felt tears well up in her eyes. These were, after all, her neighbors—or, in the cas
e of Penelope, her friend—that she had lost, and not some anonymous passersby.
Reese immediately dug into his other pocket for a clean handkerchief and handed it over. “Sorry, Red,” he told her, sounding genuinely concerned. “Sometimes you have to keep the mood light, or everything goes to hell.”
Welcome as those words were, it was hearing that familiar nickname again that made Darla’s tears suddenly fall in earnest. She managed to compose herself again quickly, though, and asked instead, “Do you know yet how Livvy died?”
He shook his head. “We’re putting a rush on it now because of Ms. Winston. Not to talk out of school, but if I was a betting man my money would be on something other than natural causes.”
You think so? was Darla’s reflexive thought. Visions flashed through her mind of a fleeced teenager seeking payback and taking advantage of Pinky’s final, distracting number to smack the young woman over the head with a convenient crowbar when no one was looking. Aloud, however, she replied, “That’s what Jake said.”
Reese’s headshake declared, Yeah, I’ll bet she did, but all he said was, “Let’s go over the timeline, when you last actually saw Ms. Winston, how you came to be at Doug Bates’s store the same time he was. You know the drill.”
Then he paused and looked over his sunglasses at her. “And please don’t tell me that that cat of yours was involved again.”
For the next several minutes, and with prompts from Reese, Darla went over the events of the past couple of days as they pertained to Penelope. Her last actual contact with the woman, she realized, had been waving to her after the flash mob dancers did their final routine.
“I did think something was off when I saw that sign on her door,” Darla told him as she explained about stopping by Penelope’s studio following her and Reese’s abbreviated lunch.
Reese paused in his writing and held up his hand in a “wait one minute” gesture before waving over one of the street cops. “Bring me that evidence bag marked ‘Sign.’”
The officer returned a moment later with a large paper bag that Darla saw had dates and numbers scribbled on it. Reese unfolded its top edge and carefully pulled out a familiar-looking shoe box top with writing on it. “You mean this one?”
“That one was on Doug’s door, but one that looked just like it was on Penelope’s studio door, too.”
Reese nodded. “We’re in the process of getting warrants to search her home and studio for evidence. While we’re there, we’ll grab the sign, assuming it’s still hanging there. But how do you know that Ms. Winston didn’t make both of them—the sign for her door and the one for Mr. Bates?”
“Because Penelope was, well, artistic. It seems unlike her to have just scribbled on a piece of cardboard like that.”
Darla quickly explained how the woman had been the person who designed the fliers and other signs for the block party. She added, “And Doug acted pretty surprised to find a sign on his door. He didn’t put it there, and he obviously didn’t seem to have any idea who did.”
“We’ll get to that in a second. What about this?” he asked and flipped the box lid over, so that Darla saw the opposite side for the first time.
“Capezio,” she read aloud, her eyes widening.
“What, is that an expensive brand?”
“It’s a famous dance shoe brand . . . slippers, pointe shoes, and so on. Yeah, yeah, I took ballet for six months when I was ten years old,” she added when he gave her another look over the sunglasses. “Wait. That must mean whoever wrote both the signs also had access to Penelope’s studio. Where else would you find shoe box lids like these on short notice?”
Reese nodded approvingly as he repacked the lid into the evidence bag and made several more notes. Then he sat back a little and said, “So tell me about George and Livvy King’s scam drug business.”
Feeling a bit guilty for saying anything after she’d all but promised George she wouldn’t, Darla explained how she had overheard two of Penelope’s students praising the Kona Blue Party blend and, hoping to get a jump on her competition, had decided to try it for herself. Reese managed to keep a straight face as Darla related Hamlet’s extreme interest in the coffee, which had prompted her and Jake to do their feline experiments to validate their guess as to what the baggie really held.
He frowned, however, when Darla told him how many customers Livvy and George were getting a day. “That’s a nice little sideline . . . two, three grand a week, tax free. The trouble is, someone else besides Hamlet might have been smart enough to figure out it wasn’t drugs that the Kings were selling. And they might not have been happy about getting burned like that.”
“But how would Penelope fit into that scenario?”
The detective shrugged.
“You said the customer base was mostly kids. Maybe Ms. Winston was referring some of her kids to the Kings as customers, and she decided she should get a bigger piece of the action. You know what they say, ‘no honor among thieves.’”
Then, when Darla made a sound of protest, he went on, “I’m not saying that’s how it really went down. I’m not saying anything yet. And it might turn out that both women died of natural causes. Sometimes two separate deaths really are two separate deaths.”
From there, they talked about Darla and James’s original arrival at the doughnut shop. Darla made a point of explaining Hamlet’s actions, from pawing on the front glass and meowing, to trying to check out the covered display counter. She was sure Reese was rolling his eyes behind his sunglasses, but he dutifully made notes all the same. Finally, he flipped the notebook closed again.
“I think that’s all I need from you right now,” he told her. “You know the drill. You think of anything else I should know, you give me a call. Oh, and I’d appreciate it if you’d keep quiet about this until I have a chance to talk to any other possible material witnesses first, like your friends Mr. Tomlinson and Mr. Mookjai.”
Which answered her earlier question.
He rose from the stoop and held out a hand to her. Reflexively, she grasped his fingers to let him pull her up, and then caught her breath as she felt an undeniable tingle run through her at his touch. Whether or not he felt the same thing, she wasn’t sure, though she noticed he continued to hold her hand even after she’d gained her footing.
“Connie asked me to be a bridesmaid in your wedding party,” she blurted out, and then felt herself blush. Whatever had prompted her to say that?
Reese’s expression behind his sunglasses was unreadable. “So, what did you say?”
“I told her thanks, but I didn’t think it was a good idea.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he replied. “But I guess a gesture like that . . . well, that’s Connie for you.” Reese seemed to recall that he still held her hand, for he abruptly released her. “I’ll let you know what I can on this later. Stick close to home, will you?”
“What? Do you think I’m going to flee town?” she asked, her laugh a bit shakier than she would have liked.
He shook his head. “Something’s really off about this one, but I can’t put my finger on it yet. Until we get a break in the case, make sure you always have someone working with you at the bookstore. And don’t go out alone, not even to meet up with people you know . . . or think you know.”
Darla was already feeling unsettled, but his last words made her shiver despite herself.
“You don’t think I’m going to mysteriously drop dead, too, do you?” she asked, trying for a smile but failing miserably.
He pulled off his sunglasses and fixed her with an unshakable gaze. “Let’s just say I’m worried that you and that cat of yours might know something about these two deaths that you don’t know that you know.”
And then, as she tried to untangle that, he added, “And sometimes, Red, not knowing can be the deadliest thing that can happen to you.”
FOURTEEN
“Reese actually said that to you?” Jake demanded in outrage the next morning over a cup of Robert’s latte. She and Darla were downstairs seated at the bistro table near the dumbwaiter, since the crowd in the coffee lounge was larger than usual, most of the clientele being Perky’s refugees. Darla had even done a brief stint behind the coffee bar to help Robert out until he caught up with all the orders.
Darla took a sip of her own coffee and nodded.
“If he was trying to scare me, he succeeded,” she said, yawning. “I barely slept a wink last night, thinking about Livvy and Penelope. I made Hamlet stay in my bedroom with me, and when I did fall asleep I had my cell phone in my hand.”
“Reese does have a point, though. Two deaths in two days in this neighborhood is like something out of a bad movie. I have to say, kid, I’m kind of concerned.”
Jake stared into her cup, her expression a thoughtful moue as she sat silent for a moment. Then she went on, “Consider me on call the next few days. You got a gap between shifts, I’ll hang out here until James or Robert shows up. And no going out to lunch alone. And we do a full walk-through of the place at night when you’re locking up.”
“Got it,” Darla agreed, giving her a mock salute, but still feeling reassured by her friend’s support. Then, sobering, she went on, “When I met Reese for lunch yesterday, I thought we were going to talk about . . . well, never mind. But what he wanted to ask me was if I knew whether or not Livvy used one of those vapor pens. He said they’d found one under her body where she fell.”
“You know, that’s one thing I’ve been wondering about,” Jake replied, only to stop short at the sound of a loud splat.
“Hamlet,” Darla said, eagerly jumping up from her seat. “He must have snagged a book for us. Maybe he’s got a suggestion about Penelope’s killer.”
