Murder on the Menu

by Miranda Bliss

  Something told me that when we discovered that information, we’d be a lot further along with trying to figure out what had really happened to her.

  I was thinking just that when my office door popped open, and Eve scampered in.

  “Look!” She was holding a newspaper, and she waved it in the air. “This proves it. It proves everything, Annie. It’s just like I said.”

  What was exactly like she said was a little hard to determine. At least until I was able to snatch the newspaper out of her hands. She had the page folded in half, then folded again. Looking up at me was a picture of Ivan Gystanovich, or at least that’s what the caption below the picture said the fellow’s name was. He was a heavyset guy in his sixties, with a wide nose and eyes that were too small for his face. The photographer had captured him just as he brought both his hands up to his chest, and the pose emphasized the sheer physical power of the man. He had hands like hams and fingers as fat as pork sausages. The line of print below his name said Gystanovich was the head of the Russian Mafia in northern Virginia.

  “See?” Eve stabbed a bright pink fingernail into Gystanovich’s stomach. “It’s just like I said.”

  “Just like you said…what?”

  Eve heaved a monumental sigh. She plucked the newspaper out of my hands. “Don’t you see the resemblance?” She held the newspaper in front of my nose. “Come on, Annie, who does this guy look like?”

  Considering the picture was close enough for me to see two Gystanovichs, it was a little hard to say.

  I inched my chair back. “Jabba the Hutt?”

  Eve rolled her eyes.

  “Bad Santa minus the beard?”

  She made a face.

  “OK, OK.” Whatever she was up to, she was taking it seriously, and I owed it to her to at least not make fun of her. I wiped the smile off my face. “He looks like…”

  I tried. Honest. For a couple whole minutes. But even though I thought and thought and thought some more, it didn’t help. I threw my hands in the air.

  “Honestly, Eve, I don’t have a clue what you’re getting at.”

  “Gregor! The linen guy.” Eve tapped her finger against Gystanovich’s nose. “Admit it, Annie, they could practically be twins.”

  “Sure, except that Gystanovich is about forty years older than Gregor, twice as fat, and has half as much hair.”

  “Which doesn’t mean they’re not related.”

  “And even if it’s true, it doesn’t mean a thing!” I was tired of looking at Ivan Gystanovich up close and personal, and I popped out of my desk chair. “We’ve been through all this before,” I reminded Eve. “You’re suspicious of the linen guy for no reason. He hasn’t done a thing.”

  “He hasn’t done a thing that we know about yet.” Eve thought she was correcting me. She didn’t realize that I wasn’t listening. “OK, we have talked about it,” she admitted. “But we owe it to ourselves to go through it all again. We owe it to Sarah. Isn’t that what real detectives do?”

  Good thing Heidi tapped on the door to let Eve know that there were customers waiting to be seated. It saved me from mentioning that, though I agreed with Eve about what real detectives do, and though I was all for the bit about how we owed it to Sarah, I wasn’t so sure one had anything to do with another.

  “We’re not real detectives,” I mumbled to myself. Once Eve was gone, of course. I spun my chair away from the door, dropped into it, and turned back to the charge receipts. I dragged my calculator closer, but even as I did, I recognized that I was wasting my time. With a sigh, I shoved aside the receipts and took out the copies of Sarah’s bank transactions that I had tucked in my top desk drawer.

  “We’re not real detectives,” I reminded myself again right before I went back over the information, line by line, and wondered what we were looking at but not seeing.

  IF MY LIFE WAS LIKE THE DETECTIVE SHOWS I SOMETIMES watched on TV, I know exactly what would have happened next. With a shout of “Aha” I would have jumped out of my chair and hurried into the restaurant to tell Eve that I’d figured the whole thing out.

  But this wasn’t TV.

  And I didn’t see anything different than I’d seen before.

  Lines of deposits. Some of them obviously paychecks, others that tantalizing nine thousand plus. But no matter which way I looked at them or how I tried to spin the information, none of it made any more sense the second time through than it had back at the bank.

  By the time ten o’clock rolled around and the crowds out in the dining room had thinned, I was no further along in figuring out how we could find out where Sarah got her money.

  Dead end.

  The words echoed through my head, taunting me.

  If this was TV, something spectacular would happen and lead us in a new direction.

  I sat back in my chair and waited.

  Nothing spectacular happened.

  In fact, nothing happened at all.

  With a sigh, I dragged myself out into the restaurant. The bulk of the Saturday night crowd was gone, but there were still four tables filled with diners. Jim moved smoothly between them. I heard the low burr of his voice as he explained the difference between Shiraz and Cabernet to a lady with big hair and a too-white smile. There were people seated at the bar, too, but I saw right away that none of them were Larry, Hank, or Charlie. Not unless they’d gotten a big dose of fashion sense. Where once our barstools were filled with guys in camouflage jackets, now Brooks Brothers reigned.

  Provided I didn’t look at Granny’s picture, it was enough to make me smile. I was still smiling when I turned and realized that one of our tables was occupied by a man in a very bad blond wig and a phony-looking mustache.

  “Good evening, Monsieur Lavoie.” I smiled and waved. I had to give Lavoie credit—with a good-natured and very Gallic shrug, he stripped off the mustache and raised his wineglass in my direction.

  “Annie!” Eve poked her head out of the swinging kitchen door. In keeping with our new, upscale ambiance, she kept her voice down. “Psst! Annie, get in here.”

  I hurried into the kitchen.

  There was a TV in one corner, and I knew when Marc and Damien weren’t busy, they sometimes watched professional wrestling, NASCAR, or that show that follows the lives of the tattoo parlor workers. Jim knew this, too, but as long as the food was cooked right and came out hot and on time, he was cool with it. That night, there were no muscle-bound cretins whopping on each other, no cars speeding around the track. The picture Eve pointed to showed none other than Dylan Monroe, looking like a million bucks in a three-piece suit and a red silk tie. It was time for the local news, and obvious at first glance that this was a promo for that special report Dylan had told us about.

  “A Soldier’s Life airs tomorrow at six,” Dylan said. “Join me. I promise you, you’ll have a new appreciation for the men and women in our armed services.” Patriotic-sounding music rose in the background. The camera panned out. When it did, I realized for the first time that Dylan was standing in front of the Pentagon. In the background, a group of workers from the utilities department was busy with a street repair. Their bright yellow jackets were reflected in what looked to be a couple inches of water that filled the street from one curb to the other.

  “See that!” Eve pointed at the water. “I noticed it when the commercial started. That’s what I wanted you to see.”

  “The water main leak. Near the Pentagon.” I tipped my head, thinking through what we’d just seen. “Hasn’t that been repaired?”

  “Sure has.” Damien chimed in. “I got to come through that way every single day. Believe me, I’d know if it was still a problem. Had traffic tied up for friggin’ ever for a couple nights.”

  “It was fixed—”

  “Just a day or so after it happened.” Damien nodded, sure of himself. “Bad going home one night. Coming in the next day, too. Then the next day, it was gone.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that.”

  “Which means…”

  I lo
oked at Eve.

  Eve looked at me.

  Neither of us was willing to say what we were thinking. Not in front of Damien and Marc, anyway. But it went pretty much like this:

  Aha!

  Because just when I least expected it, something spectacular had happened. All thanks to a broken water main.

  I grabbed on to Eve’s arm and tugged her into a corner of the kitchen where we could talk without being overheard.

  “The main was fixed the night we went to Sarah’s,” I reminded her. “Remember. It broke the day before.”

  “Exactly.” She nodded. Her blue eyes glistened with excitement. “And now the main is fixed.”

  “Which means that Dylan’s commercial was taped long before he said he was back in the country.”

  “Which means he was in town the night Sarah died.”

  “And not in Afghanistan like he said.”

  Eleven

  THERE WERE A COUPLE OF THINGS WE KNEW FOR SURE about Dylan. The next day, as we sat around Bellywasher’s and wondered if he’d show up in response to the invitation we’d left on his voice mail, Eve and I made a list.

  “Number one, he said he was in Afghanistan the night Sarah was killed.” Eve tapped the tip of her pen against the legal pad in front of us where, like real detectives, we’d noted our ideas in neat, logical order. “But he couldn’t have been out of the country, because we saw the commercial, and the commercial proves Dylan was in town that night.”

  “Number two…” I eyed the list warily. Eve’s handwriting was full of loops and curliques. No big surprise there. It was always hard to read, but that morning, the job of deciphering was even tougher. Before we left my office to grab coffee and sit in the empty restaurant, she’d slipped a yellow legal pad off the pile on my desk. The pink Sharpie, needless to say, was her own. I squinted. “Number two, we figure Sarah wouldn’t have hesitated to let Dylan into her apartment.”

  “Especially if she was desperate to get back together with him.” Eve put a star next to that item on the list. “This is important. Remember, he dumped her. If he called, say, and said he’d made a mistake and he wanted her back, she would have been vulnerable. She wouldn’t have suspected Dylan. She would have been at ease with him.”

  “And…” I slid the pad out from under her hand, grabbed the Sharpie, and added an idea that had just occurred to me. “He probably knew she took Valium. You said they’d been dating for a while, right? There’s no reason he wouldn’t have known what kinds of medications she was taking. Tyler told us that Sarah had Valium in her system the night she died. My guess is that Dylan waited until she took it. That would have made her groggy so that she couldn’t fight back. That’s when he attacked her. He probably dumped her in the bathtub, put the knife in her hand, held his own hand over it and—”

  Both Eve and I shivered. The scenario was too awful to consider. Rather than thinking about it, we went right on.

  “Or Dylan might not have wanted to take any chances,” she said. “He could have slipped her a little extra Valium.”

  “Like in the wine.”

  When Eve raised her eyebrows, I explained. “There were two wineglasses,” I said, thinking back to the night we found Sarah’s body. “They were drying in the rack on the kitchen sink. They’d been washed, but they hadn’t been put away. You saw what I saw in that apartment, Eve. Sarah was compulsive about everything, her clothes, her food, even the books on her bookshelf. I don’t think she’s the type who would have washed wineglasses and not put them where they belonged. But if someone else washed the glasses, that someone else might not have thought of putting them away.”

  Eve sat up straight and grinned. “Which means there might be fingerprints on them!”

  “Except they were washed.”

  Her smile faded. “He wouldn’t be that dumb, anyway, would he?” she asked, and I didn’t bother to answer. We both knew Dylan Monroe was way too smart to make stupid mistakes.

  How smart, though, remained to be seen, and lucky for us, we didn’t have to wait long. A few minutes later, Dylan sauntered into the restaurant. It was Sunday, and he was dressed more casually than we’d seen at either the funeral luncheon or in the commercial that aired the night before. In butt-hugging jeans and a deep green sweater that brought out the flecks of emerald in his sapphire eyes, Dylan Monroe looked yummier than ever.

  Call me crazy, suspicious, and maybe a little paranoid, but I thought he looked a little wary, too.

  “Ladies.” Dylan nodded a greeting and just as he got close to the table, I realized the legal pad was still in plain sight. I flipped it over so he couldn’t see what we’d written. He flicked a look from the pad to me and dropped down in the chair across from Eve’s. “Hope you don’t mind that I didn’t return your call. I’m a little busy today. My report airs tonight.”

  “We know.” I was the one who answered him. That was because Eve, being Eve, was busy looking Dylan over. Since I’d already seen the way his eyes brightened with appreciation when he caught sight of her in her champagne-colored cashmere sweater and the too-short brown suede skirt he could see because her chair was pushed back and her legs were crossed, I wondered how long it would be before he asked her out.

  I also wondered if I should try to encourage it. With Eve on the inside (so to speak), we might learn some valuable information.

  And if we learned Dylan was a murderer?

  The very thought sent a bolt of fear straight through me. No way I was going to let Eve get close to this guy. Rather than even consider the idea of Eve as a spy, I got myself back on track.

  “Your report,” I said to Dylan. “That’s kind of what we wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Funny, that’s not what you said in your phone message.”

  Thinking it was more likely he’d respond to Eve’s sultry tones than my unremarkable voice, I had Eve call and leave the message for Dylan, telling him that because he was so upset at the funeral luncheon, we were concerned about him. We wondered how he was doing. At least that’s what Eve was supposed to say. Now, watching the way he was looking at her, I wondered exactly what she’d said instead and jumped right in. Just in case damage control was necessary.

  “What we meant—”

  “I’m pretty sure I know exactly what you meant.” Dylan sat back. “The trailer aired last night, and my guess is that you saw it. So now you know the truth. You know I left Afghanistan earlier than I said I did. Yes, I was in town the night Sarah died. You don’t think I had anything to do with her death, do you?”

  “Did you?”

  Do I have to say that it was Eve who blurted out the question, not me? I was, remember, the one who looked (two or three times) before I so much as even thought about leaping. Eve, on the other hand, was always rarin’ to go.

  Dylan didn’t hold it against her. In fact, he gave her, then me, the same smile that looked out at millions of people each night on the national news. It was calming and reassuring. Touched with empathy. Not too cheerful.

  I wasn’t fooled.

  Dylan might be gorgeous, but he wasn’t dumb. And he was a reporter through and through. Something told me that he was as curious as we were.

  Why, remained to be seen.

  “What makes you think the police are wrong?” he asked. “The medical examiner’s ruling is official, remember. Sarah committed suicide.”

  “We don’t agree.” I took over before Eve could say anything else even slightly out of line. I didn’t want Dylan to walk out on us before we learned anything useful. “We think there’s enough evidence to prove that Sarah wouldn’t have done that.”

  He propped his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers. “Like?”

  “Like Doc, for one thing,” Eve chimed in. “She waited a long time for him. And she paid a fortune for him, too.”

  Luckily, Eve didn’t mention the diamond collar. That was a good thing. I didn’t want to give away the farm. Not this early in our questioning.

  “Sarah had
a lot to live for,” I said. “We don’t think she would have killed herself.”

  “So you’re investigating?” I had to hand it to Dylan, he could have made the question sound even more skeptical. “And you’ve come to the conclusion that I had something to do with Sarah’s death.” He pursed his lips and cocked his head. “It’s an original theory. There’s only one flaw in it. Well, actually two or three. And they’re big ones.”

  He didn’t wait for me to ask.

  Dylan leaned forward. “If I did kill Sarah, you don’t think I’d admit it to you two, do you?”

  “Then why did you lie?” This time, I was the one who asked the question. “Why did you tell us you were in Afghanistan the night Sarah died?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Because we cared about Sarah.”

  “And you’re way off base.” Dylan waved a dismissive hand in our direction. “In case you haven’t noticed, I didn’t have any reason to kill her.”

  Eve’s eyes flashed in defense of Sarah. “You broke up with her.”

  “Exactly.” He waited for the message to sink in. “I broke up with her. That’s how civilized people end a relationship. They might get angry, and someone’s bound to get hurt. But they don’t kill. Look…” He let go a long sigh. “I know your hearts are in the right place, but let me give you girls a piece of advice. Mind your own business.”

  I took offense to the fact that Dylan wasn’t taking us seriously. Not to mention the bit about calling us girls. But I knew Eve’s feelings ran deeper. Sarah was a friend, and Eve was as loyal as they came. She was so incensed, she clutched the edge of the table to hang on to her temper.

  She shot Dylan a look. “This is our business. Sarah is our business. And no one will listen to us when we try to tell them what we think really happened.”

  “That’s because you’re talking nonsense.”

  “It’s because the authorities don’t want to hear what we have to say.” Eve thumped her fist against the table. “Once we show the cops our evidence—”