She was flat out lying. I’d worked around kitchens long enough to never go near the cooking spaces. But Chef Rogers wasn’t going to believe me. I backed into the hall, brain reeling. Emily might not have pushed me down the stairs, but she’d made my job a whole lot harder. Rogers would make sure I had to wait ages for each course until he’d worked off his ill temper or forgotten about me.
Vanessa was not going to be pleased.
Sure enough, Emily waltzed out with her cheese platter before a member of the waitstaff had emerged to even take my order. But the best I could do was obey Chef Roger’s demands and hope that staying out of sight would rapidly transition to being out of mind as well.
Eventually a girl came out of the kitchen and grimaced at me sympathetically. “Nothing pisses Rogers off more than a spoiled meal, I’m afraid. What would you like?”
I tested the cheeses, pâté, quince paste, and house-made wafers for poisons as usual but also to make sure Rogers hadn’t ruined the taste out of spite. Thankfully, his pride in his work was too great for that.
As I placed the plate in front of Vanessa, her gaze brushed over me. Only for a fraction of a second, but it was long enough to read the message there.
Bad dog.
The winter sun was sinking toward the horizon when Etta and I pulled up to the first of four locations Michael Watts used to frequent before he was murdered.
We’d left Dudley snoozing at home and were in my car. A silver Corvette was less noticeable than a yellow Dodge Charger, and there was a possibility it would be best not to attract attention. Etta was back in her normal clothes, figuring anyone the wealthy Michael Watts hung out with would respond better to style than sweetness.
In front of us was an unremarkable-looking house on an upper-middle-class suburban street in Oakwood. It was late afternoon—hardly prime time for thugs or shady dealings—but I was apprehensive anyway.
Etta unbuckled her seat belt before I’d killed the engine and slipped out the door. “What are you waiting for?”
I wondered how she’d lived so long with such a penchant for risk taking.
“What if it’s an arms dealer?” I asked, then realized that might excite her further. “Or a grieving friend?”
“Hopefully, it’s the first of those options. That would be interesting.”
It seemed wrong that hanging out with a woman in her seventies made me feel old, but it did. I held back a sigh and followed her to the front door.
A lady about Etta’s age opened it. The pair of them seemed to be cut from the same cloth—both elegant and stylishly dressed. Her gaze swept dismissively over me but lingered on Etta. “Ooh. You look like you have spice. Who referred you?”
“Michael Watts,” Etta said.
“Well, all right then. Come on in. I’m Madam Devine in case my reputation has failed to precede me. For future visits, drive up to the garage and our security will let you in. There’s a private parking area out the back.”
Etta nudged me. “Oh good,” I said. “I was worried about leaving the car out the front.”
Madam Devine ushered us into a sitting room featuring red-and-gold wallpaper, dark timber furniture, and a mocha-colored velour couch she directed us toward. We sank deep into it like chocolate chips into cake batter. I hoped we’d be able to get up again without assistance.
Devine’s chair looked much firmer, and she sat on it primly. “Now we’re comfortable, let’s go over your personal tastes and appetites. I specialize in finding the ideal fit for every client.” She smiled, and I hid a wince at the double meaning of her words. “So, what are you into?”
Etta and I looked at each other. At this point, I was guessing the establishment provided services of a sexual nature, but that meant the range of potential options was as broad as Santa’s backside. And I had no doubt that if we answered incorrectly, the security she’d mentioned would throw us out on our asses. We’d have to keep it as vague as possible and hope her responses would help us nut it out.
No pun intended.
I giggled like a teenager in a sex ed. class. “Sorry. We’ve never done this before. Um. Where do we start?”
Devine kept her smile pasted on, but her eyes were shuttered, utterly bored. “Are you interested in booking together or separately?”
“Separately,” Etta said. “I’ll go first. I’ve had more years to figure out what I want than this young whippersnapper.”
The boredom lifted, just a touch. “And what is it you want?” she purred.
I hoped Etta knew what she was doing.
“Everything.”
“An excellent choice. But where would you like to start?” Her spiked foot bounced impatiently.
“Something spicy. Like you guessed.”
“What kind of spice?”
This woman wasn’t giving us anything. Was she suspicious?
“I think I’ll start with Michael’s brand of spice,” Etta said. “That’s what encouraged me to come in the first place.”
I mentally applauded her. It would make sense to Madam Devine even when we didn’t know what it was, and we might learn more about what our victim was into. And whether someone might want to kill him for it.
“Really?” Devine looked surprised. I was guessing she was rarely surprised. “It’s unusual for a woman to be into that.”
Uh-oh.
“I’ve lived a long time and tried a lot of things. I know what I like. Normal gets boring after a while.”
“Great. I’ll go and get the security boys to bring up a forty-four-gallon drum and get the girls to prepare the room for you. I’ll be back in a moment.”
Forty-four-gallon drum?
She disappeared from view, and I leaped up, trying to pull Etta with me. “Let’s go. We have to get out of here!”
“Don’t be silly. We might get the same sex worker Michael used, and they could tell us more.”
“They might not want to talk,” I hissed, still trying to pull her out of the stupid, spongy couch.
She refused to move, giving me no choice but to sit my butt down and act normal at the sound of returning heels on the floorboards.
“And what about you?” Madam Devine asked me.
My cheeks heated, and my brain seized. I had nothing. This was way out of my comfort zone, and I wasn’t a great actress at the best of times.
“We’ve talked it over,” Etta said. “For today, she’ll join us. Or at least she’ll come and watch.”
Gross. But it did get me out of fabricating up some kind of kinky sexual fantasy in front of these two worldly women. I was sure to embarrass myself.
“No problem,” Devine said like we were discussing job orientation, “but voyeurism does cost extra. I’m sure Michael would’ve told you we take cash up front, so that’ll be three thousand dollars.”
Etta shot out of the spongy chair. “Of course, but I was having a look, and my purse must’ve fallen out in the car. We’ll be right back.”
This time, she grabbed me and we hotfooted it to the car. I jumped into the cool leather seat with a sense of escaping a fate worse than death and cranked the engine. Throwing caution to the wind, I started driving before I finished buckling up my seat belt. That’s how scared I was of watching Etta with a sex worker and a forty-four-gallon drum.
I checked the rearview mirror to see if Madam Devine had sent one of her security staff after us. I’d been checking the rearview mirror a lot today. It was clear of pursuers, but we’d burned that bridge and would get no further information from Madam’s house of whorish horrors.
I couldn’t convince myself it was a bad thing. What on earth had I gotten myself into?
“Okay,” I said, checking the mirror once more. “So our victim was into strange sex involving forty-four-gallon drums and paid for it. That could give someone a reason to kill him, right?”
“Yes, mostly his wife.”
“Oh. Yeah.” I didn’t want the wife to be our primary suspect. If she was, we’d have to confront her, and if we were wrong, w
e’d be harassing a genuinely grieving widow.
I chewed my lip. “What would one do with forty-four-gallon drums?”
Etta popped a tab of nicotine gum into her mouth and looked at me sideways. “Are you sure you want to know the answer to that?”
I thought about it.
“Maybe just tell me what the next address is.”
8
Michael Watts’s company headquarters revealed no clues about the fate of its CEO.
The company operated from the top two floors of a twelve-story building in Downtown LA. We did a drive-by inspection, but it wasn’t easy to gawk at from the road. Our chances of convincing someone to give us a tour at this late hour were slim, and the chances of digging up sordid secrets under the watchful eye of a tour guide even more so. We opted to move on.
That left one location to go—just one more chance to find a concrete lead for solving the case—because the fourth address on Mr. Black’s list was the Watts’ home we’d seen this morning.
I couldn’t believe that had only been this morning.
We stopped outside a swanky bar in Hollywood Heights and made our way inside. It was dimly lit, with candles on each of the tables and a few strategically placed hanging bulbs to stop you from bumping into things. The building must have been a family residence in a former life, and its haphazard layout with many rooms gave the place a private, boutique vibe. An eclectic collection of art on the walls and brown leather couches positioned to take advantage of every nook added to the ambience.
It was early enough that the bar was almost empty. A bartender was restocking the cocktail ingredients, so we pulled up stools and ordered gin and tonics.
I’d earned half a dozen gin and tonics today.
The bartender had the special Los Angeles air of someone who was biding time until he caught his big break. He paid more attention to deciding whether we were anyone important than making our drinks, and he set our glasses down with a halfhearted smile. Not important then.
I slid my phone over to him anyway. “Do you remember seeing this man here?”
He looked over the photo of Michael, up at us again, then back at the photo. “Sure, he was a regular, but I saw on the news he was shot in his own home. Something wrong with that isn’t there? What did you wanna know?”
Maybe he figured there was a chance we were reporters and he’d get some free publicity. Maybe he was bored.
“How often was he here?”
“I’d guess two or three times a week.”
“Did he ever meet with anyone?”
“Don’t think I ever saw him alone. But he met with someone different almost every night. Used to sit in that corner over there.”
As helpful as he was being, it made me miss my housemate Oliver who also happened to be a bartender. He would’ve found a way to make me choke on my drink by now with his usual antics.
“Were they always women?” Etta asked.
We were only fifteen minutes from Madam Devine’s home. Perhaps he took his dates here—before or after whatever they did with those drums.
“No. It would’ve been an even split I reckon,” the man told us, surreptitiously checking his reflection in the glass he was polishing.
Unless our victim was bisexual, that made it sound like business. But the bar didn’t seem the kind of place his associates in the sports industry would favor. We asked our star-in-waiting a few more questions but failed to uncover the big clue we’d been searching for. I hoped he’d have more luck catching his big break.
Driving home, we ran through what we’d learned since my online stalking of our victim this morning. Michael Watts’s life was not as perfect as his social media and PR company liked to portray.
Even aside from the being dead thing.
“So according to our nosy neighbor—”
“You mean Mr. Nostril Hairs,” Etta corrected.
“Right. According to him, a woman was watching and following our victim a week before he was killed. Do you think she could’ve been a private investigator hired by his suspicious wife? Maybe she found out about his expensive sexual activities like we did.”
“Could be. Or it might’ve been a sex worker he paid to stalk him as part of one of his fantasies. I heard that some people have a fetish for—”
“That’s one possibility,” I said, not wanting to hear the end of that sentence. “Otherwise it could have been a stakeholder in the company he was struggling to keep afloat, looking for dirt to remove him from the management board. Or a way of removing him more permanently.”
“Sure. Or maybe she was an innocent passerby who got lost and was struggling to figure out how to use her GPS.”
Ugh. I hoped not. The woman in the car was the one scenario we’d uncovered where someone aside from the victim was acting suspiciously.
“Then there’s all his after-hours meetings with different people in a dimly lit bar,” Etta said. “Whatever he got up to on those two or three nights a week, I’m guessing it wasn’t good.”
“I agree, but vaguely questionable activity isn’t going to sway the police.”
We were both quiet for a bit.
“Why do you think the killer chose to shoot him in the head?” I asked. “As far as I understand, it’s a smaller and therefore harder target to hit, so you’d need to have a reason for shooting there.”
Etta shrugged. “It’s got one of the best fatality rates as far as body parts go. So it makes sense unless you’re a crap shot.”
“I think your idea of a crap shot might vary from normal people’s.” I’d been to a shooting range with her and my aunt and discovered she was a superb shot. Better than Connor even. “A normal person might aim for the head out of rage though, to make his hated face disappear.”
“Or if they weren’t any good at shooting, maybe they did it for target practice.”
I was glad Etta was one of a kind. The notion of a murderer choosing how to kill based on improving their skill set was unsettling. And it wasn’t even the reason I was feeling ill at ease…
For a day’s work by two amateur sleuths, we’d found out a lot. The problem was none of the pieces fit together or so much as pointed strongly in one direction. Worse, we were out of leads and resources.
The Black family’s happiness was hanging in the balance, and I had no idea where to go from here.
Meow missed Oliver, I decided as I watched her halfheartedly bat away at a dead cockroach. I’d never seen her play with a dead one; it was the live ones that got her excited. She would place the lifeless bodies in a neat little pile of victory and leave them alone after that. And I’d never seen her play so unenthusiastically either. Would a Skype conversation with him help?
“Don’t be sad, sweetie. He’s coming home soon.”
She left the cockroach discarded on the linoleum, two feet from her pile—another anomaly—and made her way over to me. I picked her up and carried her to my bedroom.
“You should be glad I’m not offended,” I told her. “Since I feed you and let you steal my pillow even when I’m trying to use it. Did I mention the crick I had in my neck this morning?”
I sat on the bed, and she kneaded my legs while I rubbed her in her favorite spots. That reminded me, I needed to replace my pillowcase and matching duvet cover. Of all the used household items I’d inherited from former tenants when I’d moved in, the duvet cover was the most hideous. It was one thing to be wise with money, it was another to start the new year—the year I was going to turn thirty—with rainbow-vomit bedding.
Or maybe I was getting snobby after hanging out with Connor? I looked at my Ugg boots and sweats. Nope, probably not.
“What should I replace it with?” Tiny gray and black hairs floated down from where I scratched Meow under the chin. “Perhaps a plain charcoal color to camouflage your fur?”
She seemed to approve of that, because she finished kneading and lay down at last, purring like it was going out of fashion. And on the subject of out-of-fashion thing
s—regardless of my dislike of shopping, I was going to replace my duvet cover before the end of the year.
I wrote myself a reminder and wondered if that could count as a New Year’s resolution. Between my job, my new boyfriend, and my extracurricular activities with Etta, I didn’t have the time or energy to tackle something else.
Although right now I had time, and I was trying hard not to think about how Connor hadn’t answered any of my texts. Or how far Etta and I were from casting doubt on Mr. Black’s guilt, let alone proving his innocence.
Etta had stayed silent on the way home. Either she’d come to the same heavy conclusion I had, or she’d been entertaining herself with notions of forty-four-gallon drums. I hadn’t asked which.
My phone rang, and I grabbed it eagerly, hoping it might be Connor. But the number was unknown.
“Ms. Avery? It’s Joy here. Abraham Black’s daughter. I’m not supposed to be calling, but I’m worried about my parents and I was wondering how you were going with the case?”
The weight on my shoulders got an awful lot heavier. Knowing she was a smart kid, I tried to inject optimism into my tone. “It’s going well so far. We have some promising leads,” I said, stretching the truth like it was melted mozzarella.
“What kind of leads?”
Damn.
“Well, it’s still early, but we know he was involved in at least one uh, frowned-upon activity and that someone else was following him shortly before he died.”
“Okay. Good. Because Mr. Bergström, that’s Dad’s boss if you didn’t remember, came around today and fired Dad. He hated that job, but it’s the only one he had, and with the murder charge hanging over his head, he’s real concerned he won’t be able to get another one. Not that he admitted it to me of course, but I can see straight through him.”
I experienced a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach.
“And then Principal Gibson came around to talk about how to handle everything when school starts up again. Dad’s name was in the paper as a murder suspect, and Principal Gibson knew the other kids will give me hell over it. She was trying to help, but I think it made Dad feel even worse.”
Poison is the New Black: (Bonus story: Taste of Christmas) (An Eat, Pray, Die Humorous Mystery Book 3) Page 8
