Maxwell’s face was curiously blank, devoid of his usual impish smile. Was this how he looked before he went on camera? Like a robot waiting for the On switch? It must be hard to be “on” all the time. Or maybe this was his face of grief. What had he quoted from Tennyson? Now that I had a chance to order my thoughts, I couldn’t seem to remember anything clearly. Only the pressure on my bladder was real. And the metal chair. And the smell of dirt and flowers and pesticides. Maxwell breathed in and out rhythmically. Was he meditating?
Darcie came back in the building, escorted by a harried-looking Officer Ulric. I wondered how long Lisa Orton would take.
“My turn?” Lisa demanded.
“Have her wait a minute” came from the pesticide wall. Lisa’s minute was my minute, I realized, and turned to look at Wayne in desperation.
But Wayne’s features had turned to stone. There was nothing there to be seen, though I could smell the anxiety on him. I resisted the urge to sniff myself. Amusing as it might have been to the others, it was beyond even my level of appropriate behavior. I could feel the dampness of my body, though. Good. If I sweated enough, maybe I’d have to pee less. Stone. I liked that idea.
I took a big breath and told myself it was time for a stone meditation. Stones didn’t have bladders. Stones didn’t feel panic. Stones didn’t get interrogated by the police. While there was actually no way of knowing if Captain Thorton was capable of interrogating a stone, it seemed a safe assumption. And there was something to be learned from stones: accepting the warmth of sunlight and the feel of rain, and the occasional housing relocation. A stone’s life might be simple—
“You can go,” I heard, and Felix came stumbling out from behind the pesticides. He didn’t look well. A fleeting moment of sympathy engaged me.
“Lieutenant told you, you can go,” Ulric reiterated as Felix sprawled back into his chair.
“Waiting for my amigos, man,” he explained. “Kate and Wayne.”
Oh, joy. Lisa stood and eyed Officer Ulric.
He put up his hand in the halt position.
“Kate Jasper, would you please join the captain and me?” Lieutenant Perez called out. Damn. The restroom was going to have to wait even longer than I thought.
Lisa fumed aloud as I made the long walk down the aisle behind the pesticides.
“Hi, Captain Thorton, Lieutenant Perez,” I said, smiling to make a good impression once I’d reached the settlement of folding chairs.
The captain smiled back. The lieutenant didn’t.
“You were with Mr. Byrne when he stumbled over Dr. Sandstrom’s body, weren’t you?” Perez accused, gesturing brusquely toward a seat.
“Um, yeah,” I replied, looking into his eyes and wondering if he knew I was the Typhoid Mary of Murder. Then I sat down in a chair that was a clone of the uncomfortable one I’d been sitting in before.
“Along with Mr. Caruso,” he added for the record.
I nodded, hoping they couldn’t hear my heart beat. I certainly could. The captain could have danced his hands to the rhythm. He started humming again instead. I found the sound oddly soothing. “Camelot,” I guessed subvocally.
“And you found Dr. Sandstrom unconscious earlier?” he prodded.
“Yes,” I said, telling myself I wouldn’t try to explain, wouldn’t even try to excuse myself. I had a feeling that karmic impairment wasn’t going to be exculpatory in Lieutenant Perez’s eyes. I tried not to squirm.
“Did you know the doctor previously?” he pushed.
I shook my head.
“Did his comments about deer anger you?”
“Not really.” I tried to be truthful. “I wondered what made him so angry, but—”
“You’re a vegetarian, aren’t you?” he accused, jutting forward in his seat.
“Huh?” I said.
“And the doctor threatened to kill animals,” he expanded.
“Now, wait a minute,” I told him. “I don’t kill people who eat hamburgers, and I don’t kill—”
“But you were there both times.”
Lieutenant Perez had a theme and he stuck to it. Over and over. The captain’s humming was much better. At least he changed tunes every once in a while.
After about the thirtieth time, Perez tried a new tack.
“Did your friend Mr. Byrne faint?” he asked.
I hesitated. Whether it was the lieutenant’s characterization of Felix as my “friend,” or an actual concern for my “friend” that stalled me, I wasn’t sure.
But the lieutenant noticed my hesitation.
“Well?” he demanded, staring into my eyes.
“Of course, he did,” I whispered. “But he’s embarrassed. Howie Damon fainted too.”
“Could Mr. Byrne have been feigning his faint in order to interfere with the evidence?” he asked.
Damn, I hadn’t even thought of that.
I just shook my head. “Mr. Byrne is not an easy person to know,” I answered finally. “Or to like. But I honestly don’t think he’s a murderer.”
The lieutenant asked me a lot more questions before I left: about Avis, about Wayne, about everyone else, about every interaction, every detail of the Deerly Abused. Nope, he definitely didn’t think Dr. Sandstrom’s demise was an accident.
And then he let me go, and called Wayne to the aisle of interrogation. We passed midway and gripped hands.
Once I was back into the land of indoor-plants-and-smaller-gardening-implements, I begged Officer Ulric to escort me to the restroom.
Very few pleasures in life compare to the emptying of an overfull bladder. I won’t even try to list them. But I was feeling mildly euphoric when I returned to my metal folding chair.
When Wayne was finally released, and we were free to leave the building, I was even more than mildly euphoric. The only drawback was Felix’s accompanying us to the parking lot.
“Jeez, the potato brains,” he muttered once we were out the door into the night air. “And that nutcase. He was gonzo, man, friggin’ gonzo. Holy Godzilla, man, if he’s in charge, what are the rest of the inmates doing?”
“A good job, judging by Lieutenant Perez,” Wayne answered seriously.
“Hey, man, that Gestapo-grad is a friggin’ menace. Me, he accused me—”
And then Felix stumbled again.
Wayne and I dived for him and heard an unholy screech that reverberated though the parking lot.
My heart leapt into the darkness as I looked for demons, but saw only the tail end of one of the nursery cats scurrying away.
It was my turn to faint. But I didn’t.
“You’re okay, kiddo,” came a familiar voice before I could complete my swoon. Barbara Chu, my psychic friend. Who else?
“But how did you know—” Felix began.
Barbara just grinned, her elegant Asian features as cheery as usual.
“Yeah, right,” Felix grumbled. “Presto-pronto time. But you’re not going to tell us who the friggin’ murderer is, are you?”
She just laughed.
“You know these things fritz me, honeybun,” Barbara whispered intimately. Ugh. How my friend could love a man like Felix defied all reason. But then so did Barbara.
She had just known to be in the parking lot. And Felix was right. If past experience counted for anything, the only thing she couldn’t intuit was whodunit. We left the pair in each other’s arms and quickly climbed into Wayne’s aging Jaguar.
Wayne drove home. I nestled into the politically incorrect leather of my car seat, unable to resist a favorable comparison to the metal chairs we were leaving behind, and let the warmth and comfort of the car seep into my bones. I closed my eyes and breathed. Really breathed.
“Rosemary for remembrance,” Wayne whispered. My eyes popped open.
“Did someone put it there on purpose?” I asked, not expecting an answer. “But why? Did someone really remember the doctor? Or is it a symbol we don’t understand…”
My theories stretched out as endlessly as the drive
home.
“Do you know who did it?” I asked finally.
“No,” Wayne answered. “Do you?”
I shook my head.
“Kate, is this our business?” Wayne asked.
I shook my head again.
“But I have a feeling it will become our business,” I added truthfully. These things always did.
And then there were a few blessed moments of silence before we pulled into our driveway, popping gravel.
“We can’t just leave Felix out to dry,” Wayne said as he came to a stop. I stared at my new husband in shock. Wayne had never shown any fondness for Felix before. Teeth-grinding irritation was more like it. But Wayne was a fair man. A good man. I put my hand gently on his thigh and gazed toward our house, misty-eyed.
My eyes traveled up the stairs to the deck, where two figures stood spotlighted under the deck light against the redwood shingling of the house.
Wayne must have heard my gasp.
“Felix?” he demanded.
“No,” I said. “Worse.”
“Worse than Felix?”
- Five -
It was hard to believe that there was anyone worse than Felix Byrne in this world, anyone more irritating, anyone more capable of stirring up trouble, but there was. Or maybe I should say, “there were.” I shivered in the warm embrace of the Jaguar.
“Who?” Wayne whispered, his eyes following the trail mine had blazed to the two figures spotlighted on the deck.
“My brother, Kevin,” I whispered back, wondering if we should just return to Eldora Nurseries for police abuse. Or maybe go to a motel. “And,” I lowered my voice even further, “his girlfriend, Xanthe.”
“Worse than Felix?” Wayne repeated. I took a good look at my new husband, the love of my life, and saw that he was poleaxed. His shoulders slumped. His eyes were glazed like doughnuts under his heavy brows, his pupils wide as the doughnut holes. And he was repeating himself. Wayne didn’t repeat himself. I thought of his stone act at the nursery. How much had that taken out of him?
“Everything will be fine,” I lied, and stroked his thigh, hoping to wish my lie into truth.
“Okay,” he murmured and pulled up the Jaguar’s hand brake. He reached for the ignition key.
My hand shot out instinctively, blocking his larger one.
“Wayne,” I whispered urgently. “Can you just back the car up real quietly?”
“You mean back…out…of the driveway?” he returned my question. Yep, he was poleaxed. And why was I surprised after tonight’s events? Wayne was so rock-solid, so easy to lean on, that it was easy to forget the vulnerability that lay under the stratum of rock.
“Yes, back out the way we came,” I ordered, forming my words carefully and making little pointing gestures behind us in case illustration was necessary. Because I was really worried about my sweetie now, and he didn’t need Kevin and Xanthe to make his life more complicated. And Kevin and Xanthe always made life more complicated.
Slowly, Wayne nodded his understanding, and even more slowly, he released the hand brake and put the car in gear. Too slowly.
In the seconds that Wayne and I had talked, Kevin and Xanthe had spotted us and hopped down the stairs like wind-up toys. And while Wayne had sought to follow orders, they’d reached the bottom of the stairs and run down the gravel driveway. We were trapped in the Jaguar before we’d even had a chance to roll. Kevin and Xanthe were always fast. A virtue to anyone else, except their prey.
I sighed and gave Wayne’s hand a quick squeeze before we got out of the car to make formal driveway introductions.
I identified the man who looked like a Wookiee with dark glasses as my brother, Kevin Koffenburger, and the woman with the large, mascara-laden eyes, long nose, and Mae West body as his girlfriend, Xanthe.
“Wayne Caruso,” my new husband grunted and stuck out his hand.
“So, this is the hot honey?” Kevin commented, ignoring Wayne’s hand and slapping his shoulder instead. “Great eyebrows!”
“Wayne’s a black belt in karate, Kevin,” I informed my brother coolly.
Kevin jumped back and smiled ingratiatingly, his close-set Koffenburger eyes mercifully covered by the dark glasses, and the rest of him pretty much engulfed by his masses of curly, dark hair. My brother looked too much like me, it was true. But at least I had a better haircut.
“Hah!” Xanthe snorted, pushing out her impressive chest under her tight golden sweater. Was it really spun with gold? I wondered, watching the starlight glint off its threads. “Mere martial arts have no effect on the Goddess.”
“Kevin’s a goddess?” I inquired innocently. It was bad of me, but Xanthe was going to be angry at me within minutes anyway. I just thought I’d move the schedule up a little.
“The Goddess heard that,” Xanthe told me.
“Oh, wow,” I whispered, letting my mouth drop open and looking up at the heavens above. A part of me waited for a blast from the stars, but none was forthcoming from that direction.
Xanthe was a different story. She sent me a fiery glare when I brought my eyes back down, and I put up my mental shields, ready for her screed.
“Shall we go inside?” Wayne suggested an instant before impact.
Xanthe made a snarling sound, a sound that would have been acceptable from a small animal but not from a woman’s lips. Even Wayne’s head popped back at the sound. Not that Kevin was bothered. He’d listened to years of Xanthe’s nonhuman utterances. Kevin would probably chat up a werewolf if he met one, which he might with that hair.
“Yeah, inside,” Kevin replied enthusiastically. “So Wayne, you into holistic financial planning?”
Luckily, “holistic what?” was all Wayne was able to say before we walked in the front door, since the phone rang the moment I put my foot down onto the few yards of parquet flooring that constitute the entryway to my house and my living room. Then I heard my own voice on the answering machine’s outgoing tape from my home office on the other side of the entryway, full of tinny, forced cheer announcing that I wasn’t home, etc. etc.
“Hey, kiddo,” came my friend Barbara’s voice on the incoming tape. “Pick up.”
I looked at Wayne. It was no use screening my calls when Barbara was on the line. She was psychic. But could my sweetie handle Kevin and Xanthe?
He mouthed Okay my way, and I sprinted to the machine, shutting it off as I picked up the phone.
“Thanks, kiddo,” Barbara cooed, before I even had time for a Hi, hello. “Felix is really bummed.”
“By tonight?” I whispered.
“Yes, Kate,” Barbara answered, her voice tinged with amusement. I could almost see her Buddha-smile over the phone. “Unlike you, he hasn’t stumbled over any dead bodies before.”
“Well, now he knows what it feels like,” I stated ungraciously. I plopped down in the comfy chair at the side of my desk as the nausea I’d kept at bay all night roiled my innards.
“Yeah, now he does,” Barbara agreed seriously. “All of a sudden, he’s not so eager for details about the ‘stiff.’ He never got what it felt like to see death up close. He never got why it upset you to be asked for details. Now he understands, in spades.”
I wish she hadn’t said “spades.” It reminded me of the nursery. And I was beginning to feel ashamed of myself. Poor Felix. Poor Felix? Barbara had done this to me. Barbara, my psychic friend…and master manipulator.
“What does he want from me?” I asked finally, though I was afraid I already knew the answer.
“Help in solving the case, of course,” Barbara answered cheerfully. “I told him I’d call you, kiddo. He’s too busy being all macho and trying not to throw up.” Her voice went down a notch. “But he really is scared.”
“Me too,” I told her. “For good reason. I’m staying out of it. All right? I’ve got my own problems.”
“Yeah, ain’t relatives a bitch?” she said, her laughter tinkling over the line.
“Especially their girlfriends,” I whispered back, no
t even bothering to ask how she knew about my relatives. It was useless to try to figure out how Barbara’s brain worked. She knew more things than anyone ought to about stuff you’d rather she didn’t, but she always froze on the big stuff, the important stuff.
“Yeah, I’m sorry, kiddo,” she answered my thought. “I don’t have a clue about this murder. You can help Felix find out who did it. I know you will.”
The hair went up on the back of my neck. Barbara saying she “knew” something was not like other people saying they knew things. If she knew I would, I would. And I didn’t want to. I remembered Dr. Sandstrom’s battered head all too clearly.
“But—” I tried.
“Thanks, Kate,” she said, made a kissy-kissy noise, and hung up.
I climbed out of my comfy chair and approached the living room.
Wayne sat in one of the chairs suspended from the rafters, swinging. Kevin and Xanthe sat side by side on the handmade wood-and-denim couch that was in the center of the room, a room that overflowed with bookshelves and plants and mismatched pillows. Not to mention the pinball machines, covered in papers and more books. But I hadn’t been expecting company.
“Kevin’s name is synonymous with integrity,” Xanthe announced before I had a chance to get self-conscious about the state of our housekeeping.
Maybe she didn’t know I was off the phone. To me, my brother’s name was synonymous with things like bail and co-sign, not to mention scam and, worst of all, Xanthe.
“And these are real pyramids,” Kevin took over. “A real paradigm shift, you know. We’re really zoned in on it now.”
“On what, Kevin?” I asked, putting my hands on my hips where I stood, reminding myself of the car I’d “co-signed” for Kevin, read “paid for,” which he’d managed to total within two months.
“Hey, Katie,” he enthused. “It’s a cosmic multilevel-marketing thing, you know—”
“No, I don’t know,” I said, keeping my voice cool and level. I was getting better. I’d only lost three hundred bucks on his most recent, ozone generator scam. “And don’t call me Katie.”
“Okay,” he said cheerfully, “All you gotta do is buy the pyramid kit and sell it to your friends. And then your friends sell it to their friends and—”
Murder, My Deer (A Kate Jasper Mystery) Page 5
