Brownies & Betrayal (Sweet Bites Mysteries, Book 1)

by Heather Justesen

  “Sweet woman, too,” I agreed. “I think she’s uncomfortable in public and that’s why she’s so formal with everyone. I’ve been mulling over the way she acts with Tad. I think her kids are her world, and the social face she put on was just that. I could be wrong, but I’d bet I’m not.” I dealt with people and relationships every day in my job. They fascinated me. “Valerie’s little girl though, it nearly killed me, seeing how upset she was.” Her tear-streaked face was going to haunt me for a long time.

  The bell over the door pealed and Detective Tingey walked in. “I hoped I’d find you here,” he said to me. “I had a few more questions for you. One of the wedding party said they saw you arguing with the victim last night. Can you tell me about it?”

  I blinked at him for a moment. The conversation had completely blown out of my head after I discovered Valerie’s body. It took me a minute to remember what he was talking about. “Right, she argued with Analesa about something, then came over and took a brownie off the tray I was arranging. When I asked her not to mess up the presentation and suggested she should wait for the rest of the party to join them for dinner, she made a snarky comment and ate it anyway. She insulted my food, saying it wasn’t as good as Roscoe’s. He’s such a moron.”

  “She insulted you?” He scribbled something in his pocket-sized notebook.

  “Yes. Well, she insulted my food, which was almost the same thing. If you’d ever tried those brownies, you’d agree. Roscoe,” I put as much of my detestation as possible into my voice, “doesn’t have half my flair for pastries.”

  The officer gave me a commiserating look. “Okay, I want you to tell me what the two of you said, as close to word for word as you can remember. You don’t mind if I record it, do you?” he asked, pulling a small recorder from his pocket.

  I didn’t like it, but I agreed, and did my best. When he ran me through it again, I wondered what he expected me to remember. Then he asked what I did after I left the hotel last night. I told him I’d gone to the grocery store, finished work on the cake and headed home before ten.

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, alone. I’m single, I live by myself. Alone.” And after the breakup with Bronson, that didn’t look like it would be changing anytime in the near future.

  “Hmmm.” He wrote something in his notebook. “I bet you were fuming after the things she said. Artists like you have killed for less.”

  Secretly, I agreed with him, but I saw where he was going, so I pretended not to understand. “It was a petty slight,” which had reached its mark, “and completely wrong.” Okay, so maybe the last comment was over the line if I wanted him to believe I was innocent. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Sure. Petty slights are the cause for lots of accidents these days.”

  “Are you calling her death an accident? Because I don’t think she crawled under there, knocked herself on the head with a vase, then stabbed herself with the broken shard.”

  His brows lifted. “How do you know how she was killed?”

  “I saw the shards. I noticed the vase last night when I was there, almost knocked it on the floor. Might have been better for Valerie if I had.” Except there had been another one on the other side of the door, so maybe it wouldn’t have mattered.

  “Mmmhmmm.” He made another note. “So you’ve touched the vase?”

  I felt my eyes widen as my heart rate picked up. “Yeah. I did. Oh, man.” I felt light-headed and was glad I was seated.

  “Really? Hmmmm.” He scratched the pencil across the paper again, his face unreadable.

  “Is there anything else you need?” Honey asked, breaking her self-imposed silence for the first time in twenty minutes. I’d never known her to be so quiet for so long except when she was asleep, and even then she tended to hold conversations with imaginary people. We’d had plenty of sleepovers while we were growing up.

  He studied the notebook for a moment. “No, I suppose that’s all for now.” He looked at me. “Don’t leave town. I’m sure I’ll need to speak with you again.” He turned and pushed back through the front door.

  I stood gaping after him. “He thinks I killed her. My fingerprints are on the murder weapon. I’m totally going to get nailed for this.” The thought of going to jail for something I hadn’t done made me shiver. Not to mention that I’d look horrible in an orange jumpsuit.

  “How can he think that? You’d never kill someone.” Honey pushed away from the counter and crossed the undersized kitchen.

  “Because she insulted my brownies—our brownies. How messed up is that?” I started pacing the customer area. “I’ve never hurt anyone for insulting my food—even when they deserved it way more than Valerie. Not that insults are a reason to kill someone . . . ” I stopped because Honey didn’t care what I said and I was only making a bigger fool of myself.

  “We can’t let this happen. He so cannot pin this on you. You have to open this place, and stay here, and meet some nice man and have a dozen babies so we can grow old together.”

  I put my hands up at that comment, completely pulled out of my moment of panic. “Hold on—there’s no way I’m having a dozen anything more time-consuming than goldfish.” I wouldn’t mind meeting a nice man, but it could wait a while—like until the word ‘man’ didn’t make me want to throttle one in particular.

  She nodded as if conceding my point. “What did you think of the paramedic who helped you? He’s divorced.”

  “Jack? Nice at first, ornery once I started to feel better. Idiot.” I whirled back to her. “Why are we talking about guys? I’ve got to prove this wasn’t me. I didn’t kill the obnoxious Roscoe-lover.”

  Honey met me on the other side of the counter, folded her arms across her chest and smirked. “Then we’ll figure it out. Where do we start?”

  After Honey’s kids were in bed that night, we hashed out the options we had considered earlier. First things first, I thought. Until we knew more about Valerie, we couldn’t decide where she’d been or what she’d done. “How about if we start back at the crime scene?” I asked as we sat in my living room.

  “What are we going to find that the police didn’t?”

  “I don’t know, but let’s walk it out.” I grabbed my keys and she followed me down the stairs. “Your car or mine?”

  Her mouth curved into a smile. “Well, unless you want to sit in cracker crumbs, candy wrappers and forgotten Cheerios, we better take yours.”

  There were advantages to singleness, and a clean car was one of them. It was a good time for the reminder when I was feeling my lack of a significant other so acutely.

  In no time we pulled into the parking lot at the hotel. We hopped out and I locked the doors. We walked to the front entrance, studying all the walls and the long, covered parking area designed for unloading bags. “There has to be some kind of camera system here.” I remembered the monitors in the security room at the hotel in Chicago. Even though this one wasn’t nearly as nice, they’d have something recording, right? Just in case.

  “And the front desk clerk would have noticed her coming in. Valerie tended to stick out.”

  “I bet he or she won’t be here yet, though.” I checked my watch. It was ten p.m., which was an hour from shift change if their schedule was like most hotels.

  “There, in the corner,” Honey said, gesturing to the right.

  I spotted the camera up high, taking in most of the parking area, and knowing what to look for now, I scanned the rest of the space, but didn’t see any more. We walked through the front door and I saw another one above the doors themselves, facing into the foyer, pointed toward the check-in desk. I nudged Honey and gestured to it. We both began looking again.

  Another camera was directed out the entrance to the conference center hall, but when we entered the conference room, there were none in sight. Of course that would have been far too easy. If there had been a camera in the room, Detective Tingey would have known whom to charge with murder and he wouldn’t have bothered coming to ask me more q
uestions. The area where the murder took place was still blocked off with police tape, so we went through the other side to where the ceremony was supposed to be held, looking for another entrance to the ballroom.

  We checked the hall where the catering people came in. There was a way for patrons to enter that hall from down by the stairs instead of through the normal doors. I looked closer and shook my head. “There aren’t any cameras on this entrance.”

  “Great. So that’s how both Valerie and the killer got in without being caught by cameras.” Honey rubbed a finger over her lips, studying the halls.

  “We don’t know that Valerie didn’t come in the same way we did,” I corrected Honey. “She might have used the front door, headed for the conference room, then met her killer in there. Only the second person had to slip in undetected.”

  “We need more information,” Honey said.

  That was for sure. I considered our options. At this time of night, there weren’t many. “All right, let’s go pick the desk clerk’s brain.”

  When we arrived, we found the clerk had stepped away. I called out, but no one answered. I really wanted to get a look at Valerie’s room, but doubted anyone would let me in. “Do you think they’ve emptied Valerie’s room yet?”

  Honey’s brows lifted in question.

  “It would be valuable to get in there and see if there’s anything useful, wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. This isn’t like sneaking into Collin’s room when we were kids,” she mentioned her older brother.

  I grinned, warmed by the memories from our childhood. “It’s not like we’re planning to steal anything or compromise evidence. We just want to look.” I waited to see if she would argue; she didn’t, though she didn’t seem convinced, either. “So, do you think the stuff’s still there?”

  “Could be, I think the room was paid for through tonight. How do you think we’re going to get up there?”

  I glanced at the key card machine. Working in a hotel for so long, even though I hadn’t been stationed behind the front desk, I’d learned how the machine operated. This one was identical to the one at the hotel in Chicago. Without lifting my face to the camera, I glanced up at it, judged the angle and directed Honey to stand in the way. I slid behind the counter and picked up an empty key card. “Millie said Valerie was in room 327.” I punched in a couple of numbers, and slid the key card through the machine. It lit up and I pocketed the card.

  I got out from behind the counter and we headed for the elevators.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” Honey hissed at me, without moving her lips as soon as the elevator doors closed behind us.

  What, did she think the security people could lip-read? Or that they’d be sitting around watching the videos as if there was nothing more important to do? I’d be surprised if they had a security guy at all, and they definitely wouldn’t look at the tapes without a good reason.

  “Wait and see if I did it right when we test it in the door. They may have already checked her out of the room. A lot of hotels are cracking down to keep employees from using the rooms without paying.”

  Honey stared at me, fascinated. “People do that?”

  “Bronson had to fire a clerk a year or so back because he found out the guy took dates up to a room. He’d add the room to the cleaning list and no one was the wiser. They weren’t sure how long he’d been doing it.”

  “He probably insisted he’d never done it before,” Honey said.

  “Naturally.” The door to 327 had a ‘do not disturb’ card in the key card slot. I pulled it out and slid the key card into the lock. Green light.

  Bingo.

  I hoped this was Valerie’s room, and not someone else’s. I opened the door. Inside, the suitcase had been opened and the contents were strewn across the king-sized bed, revealing a plethora of makeup, underwear and casual clothes. I poked through the items and noticed a number of designer tags.

  “Hey, be careful about fingerprints,” Honey reminded me as she used the hem of her shirt to open the top dresser drawer.

  “Right.” I followed her example, picking up a scarf and using it flip things over and poke through the clothes.

  A few kid’s clothes were in the room as well—her daughter’s, I realized, and remembered the little girl’s tears. I moved to the closet and found four dresses, including the bridesmaid dress that matched the others, though this one had additional flourishes at the waist—probably to indicate her elevated status. Then I wondered if Analesa had known about the additions to the dress, or if Valerie had added them without permission. Six pairs of dress shoes with four-inch ice-pick heels lined the floor.

  “And we have liftoff,” Honey said as I admired Valerie’s taste in footwear.

  “What?” I turned to find Honey flipping through a planner and some papers.

  “Here’s a statement for her cell phone. There’s also one from the bank.” She picked up the paper and scanned it, flipping it over to check the charges and deposits. “Looks like regular charges: home, car, gas, food, nothing special.” Still, she pulled the notebook from her purse and scribbled down the account numbers for both.

  “I wish we could see her cell phone or computer or something, see if she had a note written down about her schedule.” Honey muttered this as she flipped through a few more pages, but didn’t find anything useful.

  “We’ll have to see what else we can dig up, I guess.” I checked my watch again. “It’s almost eleven. Want to see if the same clerk is on duty tonight?”

  “Let’s go.”

  I closed the closet door and checked to make sure everything else was the same as when we arrived. I didn’t want anyone to know we’d been there, and since we weren’t taking anything with us—other than Honey’s notes—I hoped there wouldn’t be a problem. I dropped the scarf back with the clothes where I’d found it.

  We arrived at the front desk in time to see the changing of the guard. A young Latino man and little redhead were swapping the computer and cash register. We walked over and both clerks turned and smiled. “Can we help you?” the young man asked.

  “Yes. I’m Tess Crawford, the cake lady from the wedding. I wondered, were either of you working last night?” I folded my arms across the chest-height counter and directed my attention to the young man.

  “I was,” he answered. “It’s spooky, thinking about something like that happening only a few rooms away, without me knowing about it.” He shifted his shoulders almost in a shrug, but looked a little unnerved.

  I couldn’t blame him. I often saw the murder scene when I closed my eyes. I was totally not looking forward to my dreams. “Yeah, I bet. Do you remember Valerie coming in last night, or passing through the reception area? I know you probably have a lot of people through here, but she’d be hard to miss in her little red dress.”

  He blushed a little. “Oh, yeah, I remembered the dress. She came in around midnight. I know because I was in the middle of the daily reports.”

  His expression said he remembered the parts of her which weren’t in the dress, rather than the other way around. I wondered why she had left the hotel and with whom. “Do you remember how she acted? Did she appear drunk or upset or anything?”

  “No.” He shrugged. “She came in chatting on her cell phone, like it was normal to hold conversations with people at midnight. She didn’t look my way, but she was on those tall, skinny heels and didn’t seem wobbly to me, so she couldn’t have had too much to drink.”

  I thought it was sweet and rather naïve that he thought someone couldn’t walk on stiletto heels while drunk. Some people were super coordinated. I was not so lucky. “Did you see anyone else around? Anyone who appeared to be looking for someone?”

  “No. Like I told the police, I didn’t see anyone else for a long time after that, and hardly anyone in the half-hour before it. Once the hotel restaurant closes, we don’t get a lot of people in and out.”

  It didn’t surprise me. Silver Springs was practically the
polar opposite of Chicago and New York. “Yeah, the city all but rolls in the sidewalks by ten. Thanks.”

  I wiped the keycard on my jacket to get any fingerprints off of it, and on the way out the door, I dropped it next to a planter where a cleaning person would most likely find it in the morning.

  “What do you think?” Honey asked once we were out of hearing of the clerks.

  I wrapped my jacket closer around me and wished I’d worn something warmer. Arizona may be far warmer than Chicago, but in March, the temperatures still dipped to or below freezing at night. “I think whoever she met must have come down the back way. Valerie’s room was in the same wing as the conference room, but I think Analesa mentioned they bought a block of rooms for the wedding party, so that’s not much to go on.”

  “So we’re no better off than we started?” Honey asked.

  “Not unless we can get one of them to admit they saw someone leaving their room between midnight and one.” I was discouraged, though I knew it was stupid to let it get to me. We’d barely begun to investigate.

  “If we only knew why someone would want her dead,” Honey said.

  “Let’s hope we only find one reason for her death.” I grimaced as I thought of how rude she was. “The woman knew how to make enemies, that’s for sure.”

  “Then we’ll have to keep digging.”

  I frowned and tried to think of our next move. Since we were tired, though, we returned to my home for a snack. I still had a few brownies left from the batch I’d made for the wedding breakfast.

  I unlocked the door to the apartment over the restaurant and headed up. The lamplight fell in pale splashes against the faded yellow paint on the right wall of the stairwell, showing rub marks and chips in a few spots. Family portraits and postcards from trips my family had taken littered the walls. The Acropolis, Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Egyptian pyramids and St. Basil’s Cathedral in Russia made appearances, many with me and my parents in the corner of the shot.