Wendy Delaney - Working Stiffs 02 - Sex, Lies, and Snickerdoodles

by Wendy Delaney

  The front curtains were closed, so I did what any prospective buyer would do and walked through the weeds threatening to take over the side yard to the back of the house. Just as advertised, the back yard sloped down to the shore, where a boat dock beckoned me like a siren’s call.

  Walking the plank and stepping onto the fifteen-foot wooden dock extending over the glistening waves lapping against the pilings, I shielded my eyes from the glare and surveyed the neighborhood to the west.

  Unfortunately, a thicket of trees blocked my view of the Lackeys’ house three doors over, but I had a clear shot of the rocky shoreline between the water and the vine-covered gazebo standing at the center of their back yard. No dock, but a boater with a dinghy wouldn’t need one to access the property.

  I knew better than to jump to the conclusion that Joyce Lackey had hired a handyman who was commuting by boat last week and that this had somehow gotten him killed. However, given the sighting of Russell’s truck and what Kelsey had told me about someone slashing his tires, I couldn’t help but think Russell had run into some serious trouble between Joyce Lackey’s house and the Port Merritt dock.

  Just as I turned to go back the way I had come, I heard a dog barking.

  “May I help you?” asked the familiar-looking ash blonde restraining a growling golden retriever by the collar as she stood at her back door.

  Crap.

  For over three months I had managed to avoid any encounters with Beverly Carver. As for her daughter, Heather, it seemed to be my destiny to bump into Steve’s former girlfriend on a weekly basis. My mother would be quick to channel the therapist who aligns her chakras and inform me that this was the Universe telling me to get over Heather, or more specifically, Steve and Heather.

  Sometimes destiny can be a real bitch. The same could be said for Heather.

  It wasn’t always that way. She and I had been best buddies until I started showing off in a game of Truth or Dare during a slumber party and caught her in a whopper of a lie. She branded me as a freak in front of our sixth grade class and got us both called to the Vice Principal’s office. Mrs. Carver never really warmed up to me after that. And I wasn’t any closer to getting over my twenty-four-year history with her daughter than I was to fitting into my skinny jeans.

  I waved. “Hi, Mrs. Carver! I didn’t know you moved down here.” I scanned the raised beds with a riot of color lining the east end of her yard opposite a row of tall sunflowers. “Wow, that’s quite the flower garden.” Almost as impressive as the Lackeys’ front yard.

  Much to my relief she stepped onto her redwood deck, leaving her dog whining from the other side of the sliding glass door. She narrowed her eyes, her hands firmly planted on her slim hips. “What are you doing out here?”

  Unlike Sylvia, I knew Beverly Carver would never believe that I could afford waterfront property, so I needed to think of something that she could believe. Pronto.

  I pulled out my deputy coroner badge from my tote bag and aimed it at her. “I was looking to see what boats were docked at this end of the bay. It might be relevant to one of our cases.”

  Okay, since Russell’s death wasn’t an official coroner’s case and I had no reason to think that any of her neighbors’ boats might be involved in this non-case, this was a reach of epic proportions. I just hoped Heather’s mother didn’t agree with me.

  She heaved a sigh. “I guess you’d better come in then.”

  I should?

  Breathing in her sultry, musky scent, I followed her through the sliding glass door with her golden retriever much more interested in sniffing my heels as we entered a carpeted sitting room with a red brick fireplace.

  Mrs. Carver took a seat in a rocking chair next to a built-in wood box and pointed in the general direction of a country print love seat. “Sit.”

  I assumed she was talking to me and not the dog at my feet, but we both immediately sat at her command.

  “I figured it was a matter of time until someone would come knocking at my door.” She tilted her head, her full glossy lips drawn into a tight, fake smile. “But I never thought it would be you, Charmaine.”

  That made two of us because up until five minutes ago, I was more interested in what Joyce Lackey could tell me about Russell Falco. But if one of her neighbors could fill in the blanks about what was going on at the Lackey house, no matter what Heather’s mother thought about me, I counted myself as the lucky girl who got to hear all about it.

  I reached into my tote bag for my notebook. “What can you tell me about Friday night?”

  Crossing her long legs, a shapely calf peeked out from under her khaki capris as she slowly rocked back and forth. “It started out much like the last two Fridays. Russell—”

  “Russell Falco?”

  She shot me a withering look, the same one that I’d received from Heather on numerous occasions. “Given why you’re here, isn’t that obvious?”

  I forced a chipper smile. “Just wanted to make sure.”

  “As I was about to say, Russell worked most of the day at Joyce Lackey’s house and then—”

  “What was he working on?”

  “Building her some bookcases, I think. I don’t know. We didn’t talk much shop when he came over.”

  Holy cow! This was the woman Russell had been seeing?

  I picked up my jaw from the floor and tried to act like I’d heard a more shocking revelation in my four weeks on the job. “You two were dating.”

  She brushed back a long ash blonde curl. “I wouldn’t exactly call it dating, but yes. We had a … relationship.”

  “An intimate relationship.”

  I got the look again, and the retriever, as if sensing the growing irritation being directed toward my side of the room, moved to sit alongside the mistress it appeared he’d been sharing with Russell.

  “Yeah,” she said in a clipped tone.

  “How long had you been seeing him?”

  She leaned over to scratch the retriever’s floppy ear, revealing a couple inches of cleavage that had been hiding beneath her peach slouch sweater. “Four months off and on.”

  Clearly Kelsey hadn’t known about this. Russell could definitely be discreet, which made me wonder whether he had been getting busy with something other than bookshelves over at the Lackey house.

  I made a few quick scribbles in my notebook. “Going back to Friday night, did you see Russell consume any alcohol?”

  She gave me another weary look. “He didn’t drink.”

  “Ever?”

  “Never anything stronger than cola.”

  Okay. “What was he wearing?”

  “White button down shirt and a nice pair of jeans.”

  The woman Russell Falco had gussied up for had just described the clothes he’d been found in.

  “And mocs,” she added.

  “Mocs?”

  “You know, slip on moccasins.”

  Which could have easily slipped off in the water. “And you were with Russell until … ?”

  “Around one in the morning.”

  “Did you see him leave?”

  She shook her head. “I stayed in bed, but the window was open and I heard his boat start ….”

  “You didn’t hear any other voices? Anyone he may have encountered on his way back to his boat?”

  “No, nothing.”

  Something in the way she pressed her lips together suggested that there was more to this story.

  “How about earlier?” I asked, fishing. “Did he have an exchange with any of the neighbors?”

  Mrs. Carver folded her arms under her breasts and leveled her gaze at me. “You should probably talk to Pete Lackey about that.”

  “They had words?”

  She nodded.

  “What time?”

  “A little before nine.”

  “You heard it yourself?”

  “Anyone who was home and had an open window heard Pete standing on the shore yelling obscenities at Russ before he even shut off his engin
es.”

  “What else did you hear?” Any threats?

  “I heard him say, ‘Stay the hell away from my wife. Do you hear me?’ He shouted it over and over again.”

  “How did Russell react to that?”

  “He’d told me before, it wasn’t like that. That it was just a job. I went into my back yard and saw them going back and forth the entire time Russ was making his way over to my place in his dinghy.”

  “Did either of them make any reference to Russell’s tires being slashed earlier in the week?”

  She shook her head. “No, nothing.”

  “Did Russell ever give you the impression that he thought Pete had something to do with that?”

  “The only impression I got was that he didn’t want to talk about it.”

  Dang. Then again, it didn’t appear that Beverly Carver wanted much in the way of conversation from Russell.

  “What about Mrs. Lackey?” So far, she’d barely been mentioned. “Where was she during this exchange?”

  Mrs. Carver’s lips tightened into a flicker of a smirk. “She was standing behind Pete, crying like a baby. Pathetic really.”

  Her flippant remark about what had to have been a mortifying situation for Joyce Lackey surprised me. “Why do you say that?”

  She stopped rocking. “Because Joyce practically threw herself at Russ whenever Pete wasn’t around. Baking him cookies, serving him little finger sandwiches in the gazebo. Like he’d be impressed by her second rate Martha Stewart imitation. Trust me, he wasn’t.”

  “Did he talk to you about Joyce?”

  “Not really. But Friday night, he said that it was a good thing that the job over there was close to being done because he didn’t need any trouble from Pete.”

  It looked to me like trouble had come to Russell Falco whether he’d needed it or not.

  Five minutes later, I walked back to my car and drove another mile and a half on Morton Road past a sprawling horse farm on the right, and parked in front of a fenced yard of fir trees and grass that hadn’t seen a lawnmower for most of the summer. In the gravel driveway was the candy apple red Mustang I’d seen Andy Falco driving around town alongside a dented blue-gray Chevy pickup listing like a crippled battleship. For an obvious reason, as I soon saw when I stood next to it—it had two very flat right tires.

  Maybe this had been meant to be a warning, like a shot across the bow. Based on what Beverly Carver had told me and the fact that this truck had been seen parked at the Lackey house Monday night, I couldn’t help but think that this was the handiwork of a jealous husband. And if that was the case, was he jealous enough to kill?

  I heard an approaching clip clop sound and turned to see a large brown and white face staring at me from behind the fence.

  “Don’t suppose you saw what happened here Monday night,” I asked the horse.

  She nickered.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  I retraced my steps back to the road. Aside from my new friend and her three pals grazing in the shade of a giant cedar tree, I didn’t see another living soul. Nothing but abandoned pasture land across the street, and the neighbor’s house to the east was set so far back from the road, chances were slim to none that they would have heard anything.

  Whoever had slashed Russell’s tires could have been in and out of here in less than two minutes. Easy peasy. Especially for someone who lived down the street.

  Probably not so easy to prove that Pete Lackey had anything to do with Russell’s death, but that wasn’t my job. That would be Steve’s job, once this became a coroner’s case.

  “If this becomes a coroner’s case,” he said fifteen minutes later when I bumped into him outside of Duke’s, “there will be an investigation. In the meantime, there’s something I’d like you to do.”

  There was? My heart beat a jungle rhythm against my rib cage. “What?”

  “Stay out of this.” He turned, walking toward his pickup parked two cars down on Main Street.

  “Come on!” I said, hot on his heels. “You and I both know that Pete Lackey had something to do with what happened to Russell.”

  He grabbed my wrist and pulled me to his chest. “We aren’t going to talk about this here.”

  “Then when can we talk about it? Over dinner maybe?”

  His grip eased. “In front of your grandmother and Barry Ferris? Probably not what you had in mind.”

  Who was including them? “I was thinking about grilling a couple of steaks at your house.”

  “Nice thought, but your granny already invited me over. And her pot roast trumps steaks.”

  Yes, it did, but that meant we’d be spending most of the evening together not talking about the Russell Falco case and not touching one another. So far I didn’t much care for two out of the three items on tonight’s menu.

  I watched him climb into the cab of his truck. “You’re going to have to talk to me about this sometime.”

  “Says you.”

  I leaned against the driver’s door. “Really, there’s a lot I need to tell you.”

  Steve’s brown eyes sharpened their focus. “It sounds like you’ve been a busy girl.”

  “I was just …” Actually, I wasn’t sure what I was doing beyond trying to connect a few dots in my own mind. “… following up on some inquiries I made about Russell.”

  He slowly shook his head, the tic of annoyance at his jawline cancelling out the easy smile on his tan lips. “I said it before, but seeing how you seem to have selective hearing, I’m going to tell you again – back off. I don’t need anyone else getting involved in this mess, least of all you.”

  “Too bad because I have to ask people questions. It’s part of my job.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Okay, we both knew that throwing the job thing at him was a weak move, but I was desperate and Steve hadn’t left me much to work with.

  He started the engine.

  “We still need to talk,” I called after him as he pulled out of the parking spot.

  Without a sideways glance he accelerated down Main Street.

  “You can run but you can’t hide. I know where you live.” And planned to be over there later tonight whether he was in a chatty mood or not.

  I walked back to Duke’s, the silver bell over the front door signaling the entrance of a hungry patron, who in this case got a family discount.

  Lucille, roaming the diner with a coffee carafe, filled a cup and pushed it at me the second I took a seat at the lemon yellow Formica counter. “What was going on out there?”

  “Nothing.” I reached for one of the laminated menus stacked behind a stainless steel napkin holder to put a little distance between my mouth and her prying eyes.

  Duke’s longest-tenured waitress leaned her elbows on the counter in front of me, her platinum bob framing her full cheeks. “You two aren’t fighting, are you?”

  “Nope.” I perused the menu. “How are the patty melts today?”

  Snatching the menu out of my hands, Lucille narrowed her light blue eyes at me, the frown lines between her thin brows echoing her displeasure. “The same as they always are. Greasy. Are you really not going to tell me what’s up with you and Steve?”

  “Nothing’s up. And I’ll have the patty melt with fries.”

  It wasn’t the healthiest of food choices, but I came from a long line of women who ate in times of crisis. Not that a dead body, two slashed tires, and a best friend who wouldn’t take two minutes to let me talk to him necessarily overburdened my coping skills on my usual fifteen hundred calories a day. But when I added my newly engaged mother to the equation, it was as good as sticking a fork into my goal of losing twenty pounds.

  Grimacing, Lucille lumbered to the kitchen pass-through window in her squeaky white orthopedic shoes and slipped my lunch order onto the aluminum wheel over the grill. “Patty melt. Fries.”

  Hector Avocato, Duke’s weekend line cook for over ten years, pointed his spatula at me through the window. “You should have a sa
lad, mi querida.”

  Damn, having my friends know about the diet I was supposed to be on was beyond inconvenient, particularly at lunch time. “Fine, no fries. Salad instead.”

  He shook his head. “I meant instead of the patty melt.”

  “Not negotiable, Hector.”

  “Hey, it’s your funeral.”

  Speaking of funerals reminded me of the fact that Hector used to work with Russell’s dad, back when the boys were little.

  Cradling my coffee cup, I leaned against the kitchen door jamb. “Hector, could I ask you something?”

  He tossed a hamburger patty onto the grill. “Shoot.”

  “When you worked for Falco Charters, did you have much interaction with Mrs. Falco?”

  “Sure, back in the day she handled the payroll, paid all the bills.” He glanced at me, a melancholy smile at his lips. “Gil and the boys used to call her the boss.”

  I took a sip of the industrial strength sludge in my cup and reached for the milk carton in the refrigerator next to me. “I know things didn’t end well between her and Mr. Falco.” Which was putting it mildly considering that Mitzi Falco had stabbed her husband in the shoulder and then disappeared after cleaning out his bank account.

  Hector’s lean cheeks puffed out as he exhaled. “She was a handful, a woman who marched to her own tune.”

  No kidding.

  I filled my cup with enough milk to make it taste like a bad latte. At least it was a marginal improvement over Duke’s crude oil brew. “Do you think she knows about Russell?”

  Hector nodded. “She knows.”

  “I hope so.” Even though she walked out on him when he was a teenager, he was still her firstborn.

  “Querida, I saw her on my way into work. She definitely knows.”

  Criminy, Russell’s funeral was going to be standing room only. Not just with all the women he had dated, but because Mitzi Falco was back in town.