Death by Deep Dish Pie

by Sharon Short

  “Geri, I know that Todd works for Good For You Foods International. And that he’s really here to work out a deal between his company and Alan’s. I figured it out this morning, from a cell-phone conversation overheard while Todd was getting his hair cut at Cherry’s, next to my laundromat. Cherry overheard it, too. Before you know it, the whole town will know. You know that’s how it is around here.”

  Geri’s chin quivered pitiably. “Alan was about to sell the business to Todd’s company. He was going to announce the sale of Breitenstrater Pies at the pie-eating contest. He was so excited about it, too,” Geri wailed. “All he’d ever really wanted to do was be a river-rafting guide in Colorado. After the sale was to be complete in a few months, we were going to leave Paradise forever.”

  Alan? A river-rafting guide in Colorado? I couldn’t see it, somehow. But if that had really been his dream all along, it seemed to me he could have accomplished it easily enough by turning the business over to his brother or selling it years ago—right after getting in good enough shape to actually be a river guide, of course. But he, like so many people, had put off his dreams too long. What a shame.

  Maybe the same thought occurred to Geri. A fresh onslaught of her tears plunked into Geri’s Eeyore coffee mug. I stared up at the copper butts of the pans dangling overhead, and thought some more about Geri’s confirmation. Alan had been about to sell Breitenstrater Pies. In fact, he’d been about to announce the sale at the pie-eating contest. Instead, he’d keeled over dead face-first into one of his company’s own pies—a new, health-food pie.

  “But what about Trudy’s future? She didn’t care about the company?”

  Geri shrugged as if that really didn’t matter. “Trudy wanted to be an actress. She just wanted to eventually sell out her shares to fund her acting career. And that broke Alan’s heart. He talked about that often. He thought Trudy should want to take over the business, since her brother Jason is gone. But Trudy just wasn’t interested. So Alan decided he’d sell the company.”

  I thought through what Geri had just told me. Alan didn’t care, really, about Trudy’s dreams. Or about his brother and nephew’s interest in the company. Truth be told, he blamed and hated his nephew for killing his son. He just wanted to get rid of his company and get out of Paradise.

  Trudy wouldn’t care that the family company was being sold. She’d get some money that would fund her acting career. And it sounded like daddy would be just as glad to be shut of her—she was too much of a reminder of the child he’d lost, the one he’d really loved.

  But Cletus and Dinky would very much care. Sure, Cletus had the Fireworks Barn and his interests to keep him busy, but what he’d really wanted all along—if not for himself, then for Dinky—was the pie company. Dinky would want it, too, of course, because what else could he do? He’d already been hired and fired from a baker’s dozen of jobs.

  I shuddered—as many a Paradisite had—to think what Dinky would do with the business should he ever get ahold of it. Maybe that was at least partly why Alan wanted to sell the business—to save it from Dinky. But who was he going to sell it to? A new owner might not want to keep the pie company in Paradise.

  The announcement of the sale, though a joy and relief for Alan, would have upset more than just Cletus and Dinky. It would have upset many a Paradisite who worked for a modest living at the pie company, and many family members of Breitenstrater Pie Company employees.

  But now Alan was dead and so the sale wouldn’t go through. The pie company would go to Cletus and Dinky. Except Cletus went missing right before his brother keeled over into a lemon ginseng health-food pie. Cletus, who, I’d learned from Mrs. Beavy that morning, was obsessed with the health benefits of ginseng tea.

  And let’s not forget, I told my coppery reflection in the bottom of a skillet, that my own Uncle Otis was in jail for ginseng poaching—but he wouldn’t say for whom. And that Trudy’s ferret Slinky had collapsed after eating a portion of either the chocolate cream or lemon ginseng pie—showing poisoning symptoms.

  What a mess.

  The only way to sort it out was one piece at a time. Sort of like dealing with a big old pile of filthy laundry, I thought.

  Which reminded me of Sally at my laundromat. My gut clenched at the thought. What messes could Larry, Harry, and Barry have wrought by now?

  I shook my head to clear it. Focus, Josie, focus, I told myself. One nasty piece of laundry at a time.

  I looked down at Geri, who was still crying and dripping into her Eeyore mug. “Did the health-food pies have anything to do with the sale?”

  “What?” Geri looked at me for a moment as if she’d forgotten I was there. “Oh, the health-food pies. Why, um, yes.” She blew her nose into a raggedy tissue. Then she stuffed the tissue back into her jeans pocket. I shuddered. I surely hoped she checked her pockets before doing her laundry. “Alan came up with the idea and Dinky told Todd about them. Todd works in product development—maybe marketing—for Good For You Foods International—something in product development. I’m not sure exactly what.”

  She picked up her cold—and unnaturally creamy—mug of coffee for the first time since I’d arrived and started to take a sip.

  I snatched the mug from her. “That’s too cold to be fit to drink,” I said. “Let me just get a fresh cup for you.”

  I took the mug to the sink, poured out the contents, rinsed the mug, then went over to the coffee pot and poured fresh coffee into Geri’s mug. “How do you take your coffee?” I asked.

  “Black,” she said.

  I carried the mug back to her. She took a long sip, looked at me gratefully. “Thanks,” she said.

  “So tell me more about Todd’s role at Good For You Foods International.”

  “He’s some kind of muckety-muck there. When he heard about the health-food pies, I guess he got all excited—this was going to be the new rave, he said.” She wrinkled her nose. “I prefer just a plain lemon meringue myself—hold the health-food additives.”

  “Me too,” I agreed. “Where’s Good For You Foods International located?” I asked, hoping to wring the last bit of information out of her before she totally lost interest in the topic.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Hoboken, New Jersey?” Her voice lilted up in a question, as if I might know the answer. Then her chin started quivering again. “I feel so overwhelmed. I’m supposed to go to the funeral home today, make all these decisions. I mean, Alan had a detailed will, but I still have to decide on things like what suit he should have on f-f-for the funeral. . .” Her eyes welled up, putting her coffee in jeopardy again.

  “Maybe Cletus could help you,” I said, hoping to prompt Geri into sharing information about his whereabouts.

  Geri looked confused, shook her head. “I haven’t seen Cletus since yesterday morning. Dinky said he’d track him down, though. He’s been gone all morning. And Trudy . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she stared into space, as if she were trying to conjure a face to go with Trudy’s name.

  I sighed. I didn’t know who to feel sorrier for. Trudy, the child. Or Geri, the woman-child who didn’t seem much more mature than Trudy.

  “Geri, there’s something I came by to tell you,”—Geri looked at me sharply, suddenly suspicious—”I mean, in addition to checking on you, I thought you should know that Trudy left Slinky off at my laundromat yesterday with a note saying she was taking off for a while. Hitchhiking. Geri, she shouldn’t be hitchhiking and she may not even know her father’s dead, and—”

  “Slinky?” Geri looked at me vacantly.

  “Trudy’s pet ferret,” I said impatiently. Had anyone paid attention to the kid?

  “Oh, that thing.” Geri wrinkled her nose. “Alan hated the animal. He was always threatening to take it outside and squish it.”

  I gasped. As much as Slinky got on my nerves, I sure wouldn’t wish such a fate on the poor creature. No wonder Trudy felt totally alienated at home and had run away. If that was why she had run away. I’d suspected Cletus’s disa
ppearance could be related somehow to Alan’s death—pop a little poison into big brother’s pie, perhaps, then disappear—but I hadn’t thought of Trudy being capable of doing away with her own father. But if she’d been totally ignored—except to have her only pet threatened with a gruesome death by her father—could she have been in cahoots with Cletus?

  I shook my head to clear it of my wondering. “Don’t you think you should call Trudy’s mother, in case she’s heard from her? Or in case she wants to notify the authorities? Do you have her number?”

  Geri sighed. “Yes. I’ll do that now. And then I guess I should—oh, I don’t know what to do next! Without anyone around to help me, I just feel overwhelmed about these decisions I have to make . . .”

  And that’s how—after I made sure Geri really did call Trudy’s mother—I ended up with Geri in her and Alan’s bedroom, looking through gray suit after gray suit (every shade from pewter to charcoal) in their big walk-in closet, helping Geri pick out a suit for Alan to be buried in.

  We settled on a charcoal suit with a pinstripe, a white shirt, and a burgundy tie, and when that decision was made, we sorted through her side of the closet to find something for her to wear. She wanted to wear a red suit and goldenrod yellow blouse, to signify her and Alan’s favorite colors, and I tried to talk her into a black suit and a teal blouse, and she ended up with the black suit and the yellow blouse. Yellow had been Alan’s favorite color, she said.

  Then Geri collapsed on the bed and asked if I could do her just one more favor—get her bottle of tranquilizers and a glass of water.

  I went to the master bath, filled her glass—which was crystal—with water from the tap, pausing for just a moment to admire the spiffy brushed-steel fixtures and the whirlpool tub with the marble surround. The prescription bottle of tranquilizers was out on the counter, by the sink. All I had to do was pick up the bottle and take it and the glass out to the bedroom. . .

  Oh, all right, I confess I looked in the medicine cabinet. Can anyone really resist looking in other people’s medicine cabinets? And besides, there might have been a different prescription bottle of tranquilizers for Geri. I sure didn’t want to get the wrong one.

  There were no other bottles of tranquilizers for Geri—but there were plenty of bottles for Alan. A quick glance revealed medicine names that I recognized, from my Aunt Clara’s and Uncle Horace’s prescriptions, as being for high blood pressure and heart conditions and cholesterol problems. Another bottle was labeled with a name of a medicine I recognized, from the ads on TV, as being an antidepressant.

  I stared at the bottles, thinking. Alan had been a walking health time bomb. Doubt about my theory that he’d been poisoned fingered my thoughts. Maybe he’d really just had a heart attack. Maybe his heart attack had been coincidentally timed with that one bite of pie. Maybe his medicine hadn’t been working—or maybe he’d stopped taking it, under some self-delusion that he was hale and hearty and fit to go off and be a river-rafting guide after all.

  I closed the medicine cabinet as quietly as possible, then took Geri’s one bottle and glass of water out to the bedroom. She took one pill, drank the water, thanked me for all I’d done.

  I gave her a little pat on the shoulder—she was already drifting off to sleep—and only felt a little guilty that my real motivation for helping her had been a desire to snoop.

  That guilt didn’t stop me, a few minutes later, from snooping in Cletus’s room.

  His room had been easy enough to identify. Besides Alan and Geri’s bedroom, there were four other bedrooms on the second floor.

  One room had an unmade bed but was otherwise tidy, its walls covered with stock car racing and beauty queen posters, a sweater flung casually across the bed, and a book open on the desk—but the room had the dull stillness of space long unused. Jason’s room, I thought sadly. A shrine left exactly as it had been the day Jason died. I could just imagine Alan shrieking at the maid not to make that bed or move that book—a succession of maids carefully dusting around that book for the past ten years.

  Trudy’s room was a very lived-in young girl’s disaster area—the air carried a hint of musk and a sweet tobacco-y scent that I guessed was pot and a bed that was made up in a frilly white comforter and covered with a zoo of stuffed animals. It was all surveyed scornfully by a punk hunk glaring on a poster above Trudy’s bed—a young, well-muscled, Asian young man who sported a sleeveless leather vest and chains around his arms and spiky hair. It was enough to terrify the stuffing out of any of the bunnies on Trudy’s bed, but they just stared back up at him blandly. I said a quick prayer for her safety.

  The smallest room—blandly decorated, furnished with twin beds, the open closet door revealing just a few suits on hangers and several suitcases on the closet floor—I guessed to be the guest room, currently occupied by Dinky and Todd.

  That left the final room, at the far opposite end of the hallway from Alan and Geri’s master suite. This room, too, was a master suite, though smaller, but still with enough room for a desk and several bookshelves, and a master bathroom. (Occupants of the other four rooms shared a large bathroom positioned exactly in the middle of the hallway.)

  This was Cletus’s room. It smelled of pipe tobacco and was, despite its clutter of books and papers and magazines everywhere, and its heavy cherry furniture and dark green carpet and draperies and bedspread, the most appealing of the rooms, because of all the activity and life it suggested. In spite of my suspicion that he might have had a role in his brother’s death, I had to smile, thinking of Cletus in here, feverishly researching subject after subject, flitting from local history to fireworks chemistry to health foods to religious Utopias.

  Okay, so he was the town flake. Was that really so bad? At least while he was enamored with a subject, he stuck to it, digging into it with a zeal that too few people felt about anything in life. And he’d felt it several times over, on several subjects.

  And the memory hit me of him standing up for me against Chief Worthy. I really didn’t want him to be guilty of his brother’s death. Still, to be sure, I had to find out about what Cletus had been researching, find those papers that had been the basis for rewriting the play, maybe even find a copy of the new script itself—because that was what Cletus and Alan had argued about so openly in that terrible meeting at the theatre.

  I took a deep breath and started looking, just digging in through stack after stack of papers, on the desk and end table and in the desk drawer. What I was looking for would be old and yellowed—a collection of letters and a diary that should stand out readily enough. I knew I’d know it when I saw it. There were health magazines and herbal magazines and notebooks I took to be personal journals—which I did not look in—but they were not what I was looking for.

  I was in front of the bookshelf, running a finger over the hardback volumes—a collection on Utopian thought and history that could be its own section at the Mason County Public Library—when the door squeaked open.

  Todd Raptor stepped into the room. He grinned when he saw me, his teeth a hard pearly line barely showing between his lips, as he moved toward me.

  I reckoned I could always whop him upside the head with one of Cletus’s tomes if I had to. I rested a hand on one, at the ready, and tried to look casual. He stopped just a step before me.

  ”I thought I heard some rummaging around in here. Dropping off the freshly laundered tablecloths, Josie?” Todd asked. “I hardly think it’s necessary to bring them directly to the new owner of Breitenstrater Pie Company—although I admire your diligence.”

  “No, I’m not here about tablecloths, Todd,” I said. Those I planned to take directly to the company—and maybe use as a way to get into Cletus’s office there. But I sure wasn’t going to tell Todd that. “I came by to see Geri.”

  “I didn’t know you were such close friends.”

  I ignored that. “While I’m here, I’m checking for some documents Cletus borrowed from the Paradise Historical Society. We need them back.” />
  “Why the urgency?”

  “They’re overdue,” I snapped. Geez, this man really was irritating. Even if he was incredibly good-looking . . . I forced myself to focus. “And Cletus is nowhere to be found. Any idea where he might be?”

  Todd looked surprised at my question. “Why would I know that? I’m just here visiting my good buddy Dinky, and everyone knows how flaky his dad is. Cletus could be anywhere.”

  I decided to take a risk and see what I could surprise out of Todd. After all, the tome I was still fingering would surely be enough to thwart him, if necessary. Although I couldn’t really see Todd being the kind to attack me barehanded, head-on. He seemed more the kind that would sneak up on me when I least expected it.

  “I would think you’d be very interested in knowing exactly where Cletus is. Since he’s now the owner of Breitenstrater Pies, he’s the one who will have to approve the final details of the company’s sale to your company, Good For You Foods International, which I’m sure you’re very eager to see go through. What with your product-development career on the line, and all.”

  For just a second, Todd looked like I really had whopped him upside the head. He reeled back and stared at me. Then he grinned again. “So you found out about my position. How?”

  I shrugged, resisting the temptation to comment on his haircut. He hadn’t even noticed me in Cherry’s.

  “It’s true. I am here representing Good For You Foods International. Despite the unfortunate demise of Alan Breiten-strater—for which my company offers its condolences to the Breitenstrater family, the Breitenstrater Pie Company family of workers, and the entire community of Paradise—I am confident that the merger will go forward in a timely manner benefiting all parties concerned.”

  I’d started yawning about halfway through Todd’s little speech. Now I rolled my eyes. “Please, Todd. I’m not the press. Or a stockholder. Don’t practice your hogwash on me. The fact of the matter is, there’s no way you’re going to get Breitenstrater Pies now that Alan is gone. Cletus wants the company for Dinky—and always has.”