Victoria Hamilton - Vintage Kitchen 04 - No Mallets Intended

by Victoria Hamilton

  “I couldn’t hear everything you said. You didn’t say anything about Cynthia, did you?” Jaymie asked, anxiously.

  “Of course not! I just asked about that night, what went on.”

  “I heard that part, but then you mumbled.”

  Valetta gave her a look. “I never mumble.”

  “Then maybe my hearing’s going,” Jaymie said, with a smile.

  “Anyway, Johnny couldn’t talk because he’s working. He’ll call back on his break. I left it vague. I just said a friend had told me there was some trouble at his bar, and I was wondering what he had heard.”

  “Okay.”

  “You should know me better than to think I’d spill any details!” Valetta said.

  They talked about other stuff for a while, then the phone rang. Valetta answered it, and there was a lot of “Uh-huh,” “Really?” and that sort of thing. After she said good-bye and hit the off button, her eyes held a worried look.

  “So… what did you find out?”

  “Johnny was there working that night, and he remembers a pretty, older woman wearing… guess what?”

  “A soft pink sweater,” Jaymie filled in.

  Valetta nodded. “She was tight when she walked in, but the bartender served her anyway, and she was drinking doubles, Johnnie Walker Red. Johnny remembers the booze because of the name. He cleared her table, and she flirted with him. In fact… she flirted with pretty much every guy in the place.”

  “Oh, dear. What happened then?”

  “Some guy got the wrong idea and started plying her with more booze and hitting on her hard. She was okay up to a point, but then he got fresh.”

  “And?”

  “Johnny stepped in,” Valetta said quietly. “He’s got his problems, but he’s a good guy, deep down, and he didn’t like to see a lady being manhandled. That’s pretty much what he said, that she was a real lady and deserved better. The guy objected, and they got in a fistfight. Johnny decked him and the guy went down hard. The owner wasn’t pleased.”

  “Yikes.”

  “He almost lost his job over it. Anyway, Cynthia slipped out while all this was going on, and drove off.”

  “Drove away… but he knew she was drunk! Did he call the police?”

  Valetta gave her a look. “After what he’s been through? He just got out of jail, then he was arrested and falsely charged with murder. Do you really think he’d feel comfortable calling the police?”

  “You’re right, I know. But she could have killed someone!”

  “Johnny would have been fired if he had called the cops on a customer, and he didn’t know Cynthia’s name or what her car looked like.” She shrugged. “I guess you could say he picks his battles.”

  Jaymie thought about it for a long moment. Cynthia could have killed someone, she had just said. She had meant in an accident, but… Jaymie had read about cases of murder where the assailant claimed not to remember anything because of alcohol. Not Cynthia… that was just not possible in this case. “I suppose the blood on her sweater could have come from the fistfight. I mean, that’s one logical answer.”

  “And she says she woke up on a side road near Algonac. She wouldn’t have driven all the way to Dumpe Manor on the off chance she’d meet Theo there,” Valetta said.

  “But it’s still all so uncertain. I wish she could remember more.” She paused and frowned. “Or that I could rely on what she has said. We only have her word for it about where she ended up. Did Johnny say what time all of this happened?”

  “I got the impression it was still earlyish in the evening. If she was drinking doubles it wouldn’t take long for her to get blotto. I guess the place was pretty full. It’s the kind of joint guys go, to play darts and pool, you know?”

  Jaymie drank the last of her wine and set her glass down. “I need more information. A lot more.”

  “Ask your friend the police chief,” Valetta said, smirking over at her.

  “Ah, but the trouble is, the information I want is the very stuff he doesn’t have. And so it’s up to me to find it.”

  Eighteen

  JAYMIE BROUGHT VALETTA up to speed on everything else that had been happening. She was suitably interested.

  “I was wondering about something else,” Jaymie said, glancing over at her friend.

  “Shoot.”

  “You said that Dick Schuster’s wife works with Brock, right?”

  “Wife in name only… almost ex-wife. They’re both real estate agents, yes. Independent, but working for the same company.”

  “What is she like? Have you met her?”

  Valetta appeared torn how to answer. She took a long time, and said, “I’ve met her. She’s… okay.” She glanced over at Jaymie. “Look, I’ll tell you something, but it has to stay here.”

  “Does it have anything to do with the murder?”

  “Of course not! I wouldn’t ask you to keep something a secret if it did.”

  “You’ve got it; I promise.”

  “Brock and Dick’s almost-ex are dating, if you want to call it that.”

  Jaymie remembered Heidi telling her about the gossip, that Brock was seeing a married woman. That must be the source of it. “I think people are already whispering about that. So you’ve met her; what’s she like?”

  “I can’t say I blame her for breaking up with Dick Schuster. The man is a pill, says the pharmacist. But she’s…” She shook her head. “She makes all kinds of snarky remarks around me, about the pharmaceutical industry, and me being a ‘pill pusher.’”

  “I guess she wasn’t happy with the services of Dr. Dumpe, right?” That wasn’t the kind of information that helped, but since she didn’t really know what she was looking for, Jaymie couldn’t blame Valetta. “Anyway, I guess that’s neither here nor there. If they’re divorcing, then Brock can date her all he wants.”

  Valetta stayed silent, but her mouth twitched in distaste.

  “Hear me out on something; Dick Schuster hated Theo Carson, but I couldn’t imagine a reason strong enough for him to kill the guy, right?”

  Valetta shrugged. “Professional jealousy can get pretty strong, I imagine, since Theo is the one who got the writing contract over a local boy.”

  “It seemed far-fetched to imagine that Dick would kill Theo, though. However… Dick also hates Prentiss Dumpe, after the fiasco of the marriage counseling that backfired.”

  “Okay, all true, but I’m not following you.”

  “This is where it gets complicated. Could Dick Schuster be responsible for planting the fake will and killing Theo, trying to make it look like Prentiss did it, thus getting rid of two evils in his life?”

  Valetta snorted with laughter. “You really have been reading too much. That is a plot worthy of… well, worthy of I don’t know who.”

  “So it was a shot in the dark,” Jaymie said with a smile. “Someone killed the guy, and it wasn’t me or you!”

  They talked a little more, moving to personal topics. Jaymie fretted over her doubts about Daniel, Zack Christian and dating at all at this point in her life. She just wasn’t feeling it, for whatever reason.

  “You need a breather from romance,” Valetta said. “Maybe it just isn’t the right time in your life for it.”

  “That’s pretty much what I’ve been thinking. Daniel and I have been talking at odds for months, and neither one of us is happy now. Zach contacting me sent me for a loop, I guess. I dreamed about him and fantasized… even read a few contemporaries with a sexy cop as the hero!” She chuckled. “He really is a nice guy, but maybe not for me.”

  Valetta helped her do the dishes, then headed home. After letting Hoppy out to do his business, writing down some notes about the turkey roulettes for her Vintage Eats column and checking her blog, Jaymie took a notebook to bed and tried to figure out what all was going on and why. She scribble
d a list of interesting facts and questions.

  1. Theo Carson claimed that under no circumstances would he go to Dumpe Manor alone, and yet he was apparently there alone when he was murdered. So… either he lied, or he was not alone, or something persuaded him to break his oath.

  Jaymie stared at what she had written and added:

  He would not technically have been going there alone if he thought he was meeting someone at the house.

  2. Cynthia Turbridge had blood on her sweater the night Carson was murdered. However, she claimed to have no memory of the evening after leaving the Cozy Inn. Where was she after the fight at the next bar? She says she awoke on a side road near Algonac, but is that true? No proof.

  Jaymie added a note to try to find out if Theo’s number was on Cynthia’s cell phone.

  3. Isolde Rasmussen claimed that she was hit on the head by someone as she witnessed Theo’s murder. Who hit her on the head? Was she really locked in her trunk that night? Where is her cell phone?

  4. Was the attack on me and the murder done by the same person? It was a similar weapon, so it’s possible.

  5. Why was Theo killed?

  She sat back and thought about that for a while. Not just who killed Theo, but why. Of course, she didn’t know every facet of his life. For all she knew—and given his charming personality—he could have had a dozen people out to get him. She could only formulate theories based on what she did know, and based on not just his murder, but where it took place. She tapped the bed with her pen and Hoppy looked up, a question in his little black eyes. “Go back to sleep, Hoppy. If I need help, I’ll let you know.”

  Prentiss Dumpe, for one, had a fractious relationship with the writer. Carson was claiming that the family started out as slavers and were Nazi sympathizers during the Second World War. For someone as sensitive as the disgraced psychiatrist, those could be fighting words. For the same reason, Iago Dumpe could be a suspect. He was, after all, the person fingered as having been seen climbing from an upstairs window of Dumpe Manor. She made a note to find out more about Iago. Where was he the night of the murder?

  Thinking of Iago reminded her that the alarm system was going in, and she was going to be one of the few to have the codes to it. She’d have to coordinate with Haskell Lockland as to who would have access and how.

  Then there was Dick Schuster. The logic that made him a suspect was tortured, at the very least. But he had, in truth, leveled a pretty serious charge against the writer, that he had stolen his work and published it as his own. In the literary world plagiarism could ruin a career. So Jaymie had to consider that perhaps it wasn’t a case of Schuster wanting to get rid of Theo for that reason, but had Carson reacted badly to the accusations, and had they then fought? There was a marginal possibility there, but then, why would it all go down out at the historic home?

  She turned it over in her mind. Dick Schuster was the kind of man who was willing to use any tools, legal or illegal, to get what he wanted. He had used the mere threat of publication as blackmail in the past, apparently successfully. That line of musing took her nowhere. Had he arranged to meet Carson out at the house to talk in private or something like that? But then… why a meat mallet from the house as a weapon? In fact that question went for the murder, period: who had taken the mallet out of the house with the intent to use it to kill Theo? Maybe the theory she had presented to Valetta, that Schuster had done it but had tried to implicate Prentiss, had some merit.

  It was all such a mess in her mind!

  There was one person she couldn’t ignore, as unlikely as it seemed to her personally. Cynthia Turbridge. Cynthia was livid, crushed, heartbroken about Carson dumping her for a younger woman. Given her dark history with alcohol, and her claims of a blackout, who knew what she had done? Jaymie squirmed out of bed and grabbed her tablet computer from the office—another techie gift from Daniel, one she kept simply because it had been for her birthday—and jumped back into bed, getting a dirty look from Denver and an inquisitive one from Hoppy. She brought up a browser (Daniel had insisted on installing Wi-Fi in the house as well, which Becca was pleased about) and did a little research on alcoholism and blackouts.

  What she learned was fascinating, as well as frightening. Memory loss was a significant side effect of a blackout, but there were different types of memory loss. En bloc memory loss was characterized by a complete loss of memory during the blackout period, but the more common type was fragmentary memory loss, which was characterized by some complete areas of loss, and some fragments of memory that remained or came back. Interestingly enough, the drinker might not even be aware that there were periods missing from his or her memory.

  Alcoholic blackout, as a matter of fact, had been used as a defense in numerous murder cases. People had driven for hours, shot and killed someone, then drove home, all while in an alcoholic fog. This was most common among long-time alcohol abusers; did Cynthia qualify, since she claimed she had been sober for years? Could one binge result in that kind of blackout?

  She felt sorry for the woman. Relapse after a long period of sobriety must be disheartening. But it was important to find out… did this blackout of Cynthia’s have any stray memories that had popped up, or had she remembered some portion of the night, but didn’t want to talk about it? Had she truly been sober for years, as she said, or was she lying to save face?

  One other important thought came to her on that topic: for Cynthia to kill Theo that night, she would have had to know where he was. Had she followed him, perhaps?

  She set the tablet aside and snuggled down under the covers, as Hoppy turned and groaned and Denver grumbled.

  And then there was Isolde Rasmussen. Jaymie went back to what she had been thinking of earlier. Everyone claimed she was a calculating and ambitious woman, but how did that square with murder? It didn’t make any sense, but still… Jaymie had a feeling she was hiding something. It could be involvement, or it could be something she knew that she didn’t want to talk about. That was the problem with an imaginative mind; Jaymie could think of too many possibilities. Had Isolde witnessed or overheard something, and intended to approach the person in question?

  Jaymie sure hoped that wasn’t it. That was a dangerous course of action, and one she would never take. Over the last few months she had become wiser and more careful after a couple of close calls.

  But there was another possibility with Isolde. Why had the woman just happened to be driving past Dumpe Manor the night Jaymie was attacked? Her stomach turned. Was it not possible that Isolde was both Jaymie’s attacker and Theo’s killer? After all, it was her cell phone that had summoned Jaymie to Theo’s murder scene. If she hadn’t had Valetta with her, she might have been murdered. Isolde’s possible culpability was one avenue she had to follow, for her own peace of mind… but not late at night, or she’d never sleep! Her brain was tied up in knots at the thought of all these suspects.

  Enough murder and suspicion. She picked up her Regency anthology off the nightstand, huddling down in the bed to read. When she finally turned off the light a couple of hours later, she drifted to sleep dreaming of an old English manor house and a handsome viscount who wanted nothing more than to hold her in his arms and dance the night away.

  Nineteen

  THE DAY WAS going to be a long one. Jaymie headed to the Emporium early to do some catching up on the vintage picnic business. Jaymie and Valetta then opened the store and pharmacy counter right on time, at nine a.m. It wasn’t exactly bustling, but there was a steady stream of local customers coming in for prescriptions and groceries of the milk, bread and butter sort.

  After their midmorning tea break and gossip, Valetta and Jaymie were both back to work. At about eleven thirty Dick Schuster came in for a prescription, then picked up some things and started toward the cash desk, basket of foodstuffs and random items in hand. This was an opportunity Jaymie hadn’t expected, to talk to someone who was intimately invo
lved in the whole Debacle at Dumpe Manor, as she had begun to think of the controversies swirling around the history, who was going to write it and what was going to be in it.

  She made a mental note to drop in to the bed-and-breakfast to talk to Theo Carson’s mother, because she was curious whether anything had been found in his papers, though the police would certainly have gone through everything with a fine-tooth comb. Jaymie was looking for something different, though, something not necessarily related to the murder but that could provide an oblique motive that only a historian or writer would see.

  Schuster plunked his stuff down on the worn wooden counter, looked up and, seeing who was in front of him as cashier, dropped some items. He picked them up, then nervously shuffled them around, knocking down some candy bars that were in a display in front of the counter. He picked them up, too, and tossed them into a bin willy-nilly. She wondered why he seemed so nervous, but decided to capitalize on it to get him to talk. Nervous people often talked more than they should, in her experience.

  After greeting him by name, she said, “So, you must be glad Theo Carson is out of the picture. Are you going to apply again for the job of writing the Dumpe family history?” She gathered his items together and started to sort them—slowly—then leisurely typed in a bar code number from a package of disposable razors. The Klausners had barely entered the twenty-first century by having a computerized cash register, but they hadn’t plunked down good money for a bar code scanner system yet. Nobody in Queensville was in that much of a hurry.

  “Why would I do that?” He pushed the things together and something else fell off the counter. He bent to pick it up, his face red.

  Jaymie tried to keep from smiling, and tried even harder not to show how interested she was in his nervousness. Was she facing Theo Carson’s murderer? He seemed too nervous and clumsy to kill someone in such a cold-blooded manner, but she had been fooled before.

  She again sorted the items, then checked to see which ones she had already typed in. “Well, we’re going to need someone to write the family and house history, and we didn’t have that much luck last time. We only had you and Theo Carson. Now that he’s out of the picture, it would be more likely you’d get the job. Don’t you think?”