The Fiesta Burger Murder (A Burger Bar Mystery Book 1)

by Rosie A. Point

  I inched along the house. Likely, they wouldn’t notice me even if I threw a Mardi Gras themed party on the lawn – they were too involved in their own drama – but I wasn’t ready to risk discovery.

  “You have to talk to me, Pete. We have to talk about what happened,” Frances said, in practiced snootiness. I’d been ready to give her the benefit of the doubt about the whole money thing until she’d arrived in a tricked out car. I wasn’t an enthusiast but man, that thing was pretty.

  “Nothing happened. Nothing,” Pete replied. Which meant, of course, something had happened. I didn’t know what it was yet.

  “Paul –”

  “Leave him out of this,” Pete said. “You have no respect for the dead.”

  “You want to talk about respect?! You didn’t even like the guy and now you want to take a piece out of his will? A bit of the pie for Pete, right? You’re such a lowlife. You don’t deserve anything from me or from him,” Frances screeched.

  “You were the one who wanted a divorce! And I cared for Paul when you wouldn’t. He needed help and I gave it to him and you ignored us both.”

  “You used Paul to get to me,” Frances said. “You didn’t care about him. You only had him here on the off chance that I might visit you.”

  “Please, you both have to calm down,” Sawyer said, but even he sounded hot under the collar. This fondue pot was about to bubble over.

  “Get out of here!” Pete said. “You wouldn’t talk to me at the event the other night, so now you’ll talk to my lawyer. And I’ll get what I want, Frances. You mark my words. I will get what is rightfully mine.”

  This was my chance. Frances would march round the corner to get back to her car in a second. I pushed off and sprinted toward the far end of the house. I squeezed between the Suburban and the cherry red speedster and hauled butt down the dirt path, trees joggling in my view.

  The continuing fight rang out behind me. Both voices raised against each other.

  I hit the woods and didn’t stop until I’d reached Old Dirt Road, lungs burning. The pain was worth it. I’d just confirmed my suspect list.

  I checked my cell again and sighed. I was already late. Grizzy would have questions.

  Chapter 12

  That evening Grizzy and I sat at her kitchen table feasting on another of her creations. She could pretend she didn’t know how to cook all she wanted but the proof was in the pudding, or in this case, the cheesy quesadillas.

  “What’s up?” I asked. “You’ve been quiet all day.”

  Grizzy shrugged and took another bite of her tortilla treat. She didn’t answer, didn’t even look in my direction.

  “Griz, I know you. We’ve skyped every week for years since I left, and you’ve always told me what’s on your mind,” I said. Apart from the whole Arthur Cotton crush and all-consuming loneliness, of course. Grizzy liked to put up a brave face.

  My friend took another bite and didn’t answer.

  I let the quesadilla hover in mid-air. “Is it about Arthur?” I asked.

  “What? No! Why would you even ask that?” Grizzy dropped her hands into her lap and wiped them on her napkin. “No. I – ugh, it’s stupid. You’ll think I’m overreacting and I don’t want to worry you.”

  “Worry me? Well, you’ve succeeded in making that happen.” Grizzy heaved a sigh. “It’s not about Arthur. Well, it is but it isn’t.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “It’s about the interview down at the station the other day,” Grizzy said. “Things got odd, Chris. It made me feel uncomfortable.”

  “In what way?” My pulse skipped up a notch.

  “I dunno, it was the questions they were asking. How they phrased things. Arthur wasn’t the one who spoke to me, it was Detective Balle, and he came down tough. I got the feeling he thinks I did it.”

  “No way. That’s ridiculous. You’re not capable of hurting anyone and if that was the case, why don’t they investigate me?” I asked. “Or question me again?”

  Grizzy worried her bottom lip with her teeth. “You might know I’m not capable, but the detectives have to investigate, right? And they’re definitely investigating me.”

  “Yeah, but that still doesn’t explain why they wouldn’t interview me, as well. I was the one who was with you when it happened,” I said. If the cops were serious about Griselda as a suspect they would’ve spoken to me first. I’d provided her ‘alibi.’

  “Maybe they’re still piecing things together. Or they’re going to interview you next. Either way, it’s freaking me out a little. I’m not used to this kind of attention. Chris,” she said, and swallowed, “I’ve noticed people glaring in the bar. Every time I make a milkshake for a customer I swear they’re staring. Missi, Virginia, George, everybody.”

  “You’re overreacting,” I said. “The interview is bothering you and it’s changed your perspective of everything. I guarantee you Missi and Virginia don’t think you did it. They’re concerned about you because they noticed you’re acting differently.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, they asked me about you.” I left out the part about Arthur-awkward cycles. “People are worried, that’s all. I think it’s because Sleepy Creek is so set in its ways. When anything changes it’s the talk of the town.”

  “That’s true,” Grizzy said, and perked up a bit. “They still haven’t stopped talking about your arrival.”

  “See? Wait, what?” I laughed. “What exactly are they saying?”

  “Nothing specific. Questions about, you know, the past.”

  “Oh.” I blew past that real quick. Discussing what’d happened to my mother didn’t rank high on the dinner table topic list.

  “Yeah.” Grizzy drank her pop, ice cubes clinking against the glass, and didn’t add anything to the statement. I silently blessed her for it.

  I searched for a change of topic and landed on the one thing that’d anger my friend rather than placate her. But I had to tell her now. Griselda worrying over her fate removed the option for secrecy.

  “I’ve been checking out leads in the case,” I said.

  “What?!”

  I winced. Boy, this ought to be good.

  Grizzy spluttered.

  “You’re turning red,” I said. “Calm down.”

  “C-c-calm down? You’re –”

  Curly Fries chose that moment to wander into the kitchen in search of quesadilla morsels. She sat beside Griselda’s chair and prrt-meowed.

  Griselda ignored her – miracles did happen – and continued the soundless gabbing like a fish out of water.

  “I’ve followed leads, you know? Nothing serious.”

  “It is serious. You’re going to lose your job if anyone finds out you’re interfering in an investigation. Christie, you could land in jail. You know that. You of all people have to know that because you’re a detective.” Grizzy ripped up her napkin into tiny shreds in measured movements.

  “I do know that, but it’s my choice to make,” I said.

  She was disarmed by that. “Fine, it’s your choice.” She threw her hands up and pieces of napkin fluttered to the tiles. One landed on Curly Fries’ nose and the cat pawed it off and meowed again.

  “I don’t want to feel guilty about this and I know that I should leave it up to Detective Balle, but you don’t understand what this is like for me.”

  “Help me understand,” Grizzy replied.

  “It’s like, uh, how do I put this?” I focused on the fading light, shades of gray playing over the porch, the cordoned off back garden. The police line against the fence vibrated – a strand of web shaken by the breeze. “It’s Sleepy Creek and it’s a case. I know it’s not my case and that it’s a threat to everything I have, but every time I think about it I think about – her. I think about what she’d do in the situation.”

  “She wouldn’t endanger her future,” Griselda said.

  “She’d investigate. She was driven.”

  Grizzy locked down her opinion tighter than Missi�
��s hand on a milkshake glass.

  “Say it,” I said.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way but your mother isn’t the best example, Chris. She pushed too hard and went too far a lot of the time. You remember the trouble she got into investigating her cases. You remember what it was like because you lived it.”

  “Things changed when we came to Sleepy Creek,” I said.

  “Your mother hated Sleepy Creek.”

  “You’re right there.” I sighed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve got a burning desire to find the truth. About everything. About every case and especially hers, but I’m too scared to touch that one so I focus on all the others instead. I guess I do know what’s wrong with me.”

  Grizzy finally got up and fetched kibble for Curly Fries. She poured it into the bowl and the rattle filled the silence. Curly Fries sniffed the food, turned up her nose, and stalked out of the kitchen again. A true cat act.

  “I don’t want you to get in trouble,” Grizzy said. “But if you need to do this I won’t stop you. Not that I can, ha. You’re the most stubborn person I’ve met. Just don’t do anything crazy, okay? No snooping around and making people angry. Nothing illegal.”

  “Of course,” I said. Stubborn was good in my books – it meant I kept at it until I found the answers I needed.

  A knock banged and we both hopped on the spot. The clock read 7:30 pm. “Expecting visitors?” I asked.

  Grizzy led the way through to the living room and front door. The knock didn’t let up. “Who’s there?” She called out.

  “Detective Balle. Open up, Miss Lewis.”

  Chapter 13

  Grizzy let the detective into the living area, casting furtive looks in my direction as if I’d know what this was about. Technically, we both knew what this was about. At least, I thought we did – Balle might’ve come because he’d discovered my forest-spelunking shenanigans from the afternoon.

  “Detective Balle,” Grizzy said, “how are you this evening?” She placed emphasis on the last word.

  “Sorry to interrupt you at this time of the night,” Balle said, “but crucial evidence has emerged and I need to talk to you about it.”

  “Of course,” Griselda replied. “Let me clear dinner off the table.”

  Balle coughed. “It’s Miss Watson I need to speak with.”

  The air went out of the room. Grizzy and I swam in space, floundering for words. The question I’d asked earlier slammed home.

  Surely, the detective would have spoken to me if he’d had suspicions about Griselda?

  Oh boy. “Sure,” I said, and gestured to the sofas directed at the flat screen TV in Grizzy’s entertainment center. “We can all talk in the living room.”

  Balle was reluctant. “I need to speak to you, ma’am. In private. This interview is better conducted at the station.”

  “There’s no need for that.” If he imagined I’d go down to the station at this hour, willingly, he had another thing coming. I’d lawyer up so fast his world would invert, right itself, then spin off axis. The advantages of knowing my rights after reading them to others countless times. “Anything you need to speak to me about, Griselda can hear too. We’re living together and we witnessed the crime together.”

  Fat chance he’d let that one slide. Balle directed that piercing too-handsome scowl at me. “This is my investigation, Watson, not yours. You will proceed according to my wishes.”

  He was within the bounds of the law to ask me to speak with him privately. I could refuse, sure, but he’d just get a warrant and I’d find out nothing about the case in the interim. I needed Balle to remain open to prompting here.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll make us a cup of coffee before we start.”

  Griselda processed the interaction in a series of head positions, first to me then back to Balle, then to me again. Finally, she made a tiny grunt and trooped toward the staircase.

  I whipped up the pot of coffee, a tray of mugs, sugar, cream, everything Balle might need to loosen the tongue, then carried it through to the living room where he sat in one of the armchairs. He was out of place between the flower vase and the bookcase in the corner. He shifted in his seat as if he was aware of that.

  “It’s good,” I said, and positioned the tray on the coffee table. “Griselda has excellent taste in coffee.”

  Detective Balle took a cup and dumped three sugars into it. He stirred and plinked the spoon against the rim.

  “That’s a lot of sugar,” I said.

  “I need it. Sweetens up my sour attitude,” Balle replied, and flashed me a grin. A brief show of the man beneath the uniform.

  The uniform – I couldn’t allow myself to forget that. This was his job. “What do you need to talk to me about?”

  Balle withdrew two items from his breast pocket – a notepad and a plastic bag containing a slip of white paper. He placed both facedown on his knee. “As I said, new evidence has come to light. It involves you, directly.”

  “What? That’s impossible.”

  Balle hesitated. “I – uh, I want to do where you’re comfortable.”

  “Okay?”

  “I understand that you’ve had a turbulent history with Sleepy Creek,” Liam continued, and my throat closed a little –how much did this detective know about me? He hadn’t been around when Griz and I had attended high school.

  Balle waited for me to say something, anything, but I was loath to speak. If he already knew, I didn’t need to fill him in on the details. If he didn’t, I’d prefer it stayed that way. I wasn’t ashamed of my mother, but the pain was still there. The only person who I talked with about it was Griselda, and even we avoided the topic as a general rule.

  “I’m not here to mince words,” Balle said, doing precisely that.

  “Then don’t. Get to the point. I appreciate expediency, it’s part of the job description.”

  Balle hesitated longer, rolled the pads of his thumbs against each other. “We found a torn picture on Paul’s person. It took us time to identify it and cover our bases.”

  “All right.”

  He picked up the plastic bag which contained that slip of paper – no, the picture – and handed it to me. His fingertips brushed mine and sent a jolt through me.

  I snapped my hand back, picture too, and sucked in a breath. Why was I so nervous? It was a picture. But who was in it? Or what?

  I turned the bag over and lost my breath. The coffee table swam beyond the center point of my focus. My world. My mother – torn around the edges but smiling up at me, the sun forming a halo around her dark locks.

  I didn’t want to show weakness in front of Balle, but this was the first time I’d seen her face in ten years. I’d hidden all the pictures I’d had of her after a night of wine and weeping in my student apartment back before I’d become an officer.

  “Do you need a minute?” Liam asked.

  “No,” I croaked. I tore myself from the image. “Why did Loo- Paul have this?” The question dominated me, along with the image of my mother’s coffin and the cold, gray tombstone which sat above it now.

  “I hoped you’d be able to shed light on that,” Balle said.

  “Me?”

  “Yes. You understand how this appears, right?”

  I didn’t want to admit I did.

  “Your mother’s case was never solved. You left town years ago, according to my reports, and the day you return a man with your mother’s picture is murdered in your best friend’s back yard?”

  “You think I did it,” I said, and snorted because it was ridiculous. I was a police officer. A homicide detective. What, did he think I’d gone all Dexter on him and lost it because of a sabbatical?

  “I don’t think anything. I follow the leads,” Liam replied.

  “I don’t know why Paul had a picture of my mother. I got rid of all that stuff years ago and anything we had left over was placed in storage. The house was, well, you know what happened to it, I’ll wager. It was razed to the ground.”
All the evidence destroyed.

  “Which means Paul must’ve had this image for quite some time. Do you know if he was involved with your mother?”

  “No! No, I mean, I didn’t even know Paul existed until a few days ago,” I said. “And I have no idea why he would have the picture or why he would’ve climbed our back fence.”

  “Perhaps, he wanted to talk to you,” Balle suggested.

  “About my mother? About – I didn’t even know the guy.” This had shaken me to the core. Despite what Grizzy might think, I hadn’t come back to Sleepy Creek to investigate my mother’s death. I’d come back to prove that I could move on. That it was in the past and it wasn’t the reason I’d gone on a tangent in my last case.

  But this changed everything. A picture of my mother on the body of a murder victim. How was she involved? Why?

  I couldn’t tell Liam I’d done investigating of my own without landing in trouble with him and the Captain back in Boston. That was off the table.

  “You can’t think of any reason why Paul would’ve had this image?”

  “No, I can’t. I could make deductions from a professional standpoint but not a personal one. I didn’t know the guy.”

  “Thank you for your time, Miss Watson,” he said, and laid out his palm.

  I didn’t give him the picture back. I studied her expression, the joy, the sweet smile.

  “Miss Watson? I’m going to need that picture –”

  I placed it in his hand and turned my head. I failed to block the tears which pricked at my constitution. I’d never gotten over this. I’d wanted to, but it hadn’t happened in all my years. Maybe because I’d never tackled it head-on.

  Liam Balle rose from the armchair and towered over me, his woody cologne light on the air. “I’ll be in touch, Miss Watson,” he said, softly. He left the living room and let himself out, the only indication he’d left was the soft click of the front door.

  I stared at the tray on the table and Balle’s half-empty mug. My mother. How had she become involved in this?

  “Chris?”

  Grizzy hovered beneath the arch which led into the kitchen.