by Holly Plum
“I’d like to see a list of his clients,” Mari said.
“It will certainly narrow your dining options.” José raised his eyebrows.
Fragments of conversations she'd had with Bubba Jones came floating back to her. “So that’s why Bubba said, no one has said anything about his sausage pizza yet. He’s been buying illegal meats.”
“And not just him," her father added. "The Lucky Noodle never found another meat-deliverer after they lost their last one. They, um, weren’t as lucky as we were. I suspect that all their meats for some time have come out of the back of that van too.”
“Imagine if word of that got out,” Mari muttered. She shuttered just thinking about it.
“Right now it would be the least of their problems.”
“So what was he trying to sell you?” Mari asked.
“Horse.” Mr. Ramirez spoke the word softly, as though ashamed to say it. “He was selling it at half price from some stables in another county.”
“Gross," Mari responded. "And you told him no, right?”
Mr. Ramirez did not answer.
“I can’t believe you,” Mari accused him, in a tone she had never dared use to address her father before. “After all the hardships this restaurant has been through, after all, the hard work we’ve done to get where we are. I can't believe you would even consider embarrassing us like this. There are just no words for what I’m feeling right now.”
Mari slumped her shoulders as if overcome by the force of her feelings. She was alarmed by their intensity and the words coming out of her mouth sounded like nothing she had ever said before. If she was completely honest, Mari sounded like her dad.
Mr. Ramirez nodded gravely as if to concede the truth of what his daughter had said.
“I know you think of me as your father before anything else,” Mr. Ramirez said. “Growing up, you thought we had never been anything but your mom and dad. And in your eyes, we were perfect. But that’s not all I am, Mari. I’m also a businessman, and I have to think about the long-term health of this restaurant. I will do whatever it takes to keep us in business.”
“Even if it means serving tainted meats?” Mari asked, her voice rising again. “Lying to customers? Breaking the law?”
“It was just hearing the guy out,” he replied. “Of course I wouldn't have accepted his offer.”
“Good." Mari placed her hands on her hips. "I hope it stays that way."
Mari assessed this new information in light of her larger investigation. “We know for a fact that Katerina Georgiou, Bubba Jones, and Mr. Chun have all been purchasing illegal meats. This narrows down our list of murder suspects considerably.”
“How so?” Mr. Ramirez asked.
Mari sat down in the office chair and ran her hands over her damp forehead. “Because,” Mari said. “Because the only reason I thought Katerina and Bubba were guilty was because they were both keeping secrets. Now we know the secret they were keeping involved the type of meat they were buying. Therefore…” She paused. She saw it all laid out before her. It was a puzzle she was so close to solving.
“Therefore?”
“So,” Mari continued, “that removes them from suspicion. They were being shady because of the meat, not the murder. Hopefully. That leaves one last possibility.”
Mr. Ramirez held up his hands to call time out. “If you’re about to say Mr. Chun is the killer, I'll stop you right there. He’s a terrible man, but we’ve been down this road before and accusing him of things he hasn’t done never gets us anywhere.”
“What if this time we’re right?” Mari looked up at him, a determined gleam in her eye. “Mr. Chun has more motive than anyone else. He had more reason to hate Brandy than anyone else.”
“Mari, just because someone has a reason to kill that doesn’t mean they will. Listen to yourself. Come back, before you go over the edge.” Mr. Ramirez crossed his arms in disapproval.
But Mari wasn’t listening. Her biggest concern was one she couldn’t share with her dad. Somehow the whole Chun family must have been involved in the murder. They must have all agreed to it to protect their business. Alex was slowly being lured by Jia Chun into a nest of snakes.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mari planned to talk with Alex about his girlfriend when they went to meet the informant that night, but she had no success recruiting him or David. David was taking part in an illegal street race, one that he'd had scheduled for weeks and had no hope of getting out of. Alex had informed Mari that he had a meeting, which she took to mean that he was going out with Jia. Both David and Alex had asked her not to tell their father.
After the last customer had left for the night, Mari closed the restaurant with Chrissy.
“It looks like Brandy’s murder is never going to be solved,” Chrissy said. “It is a shame because she deserved better.”
“Someone will figure it out,” Mari disagreed. She had long since given up thinking it was her. “The killer will eventually get overconfident and do something stupid.”
“I hope you're wrong,” Chrissy replied with a shudder. “I don’t like thinking there’s a killer still out there, and we’re not going to know who it is until they kill again.”
Mari hoped that tonight would put an end to the mystery surrounding her poisoned salsa. The writer of the letter had been confident about having information that would lead to the killer, along with having a weirdly precise knowledge of Mari’s investigation during the last week. If there was someone else in this town who knew everything that went on, she wanted to meet them. Tonight might've been Mari's last chance to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.
The fruit market had shut down a few years ago and now existed only as an empty warehouse and a couple of boarded-up windows. It stood in the darkest, and remotest part of town, the part of town Mari dreaded going into after sunset. Only a single street lamp illuminated the litter-strewn parking lot, and it was far from the main road.
Mari parked in an space in front of the fruit market and left the front headlights of her car on so she could see clearly in the thick darkness. It had been raining that day, and the night was foggy. Mist swirled around the car and stray shopping carts.
With the loud clang of a bell and the blow of a horn, the midnight train went running past. A creature howled in the dark. Mari thought it must be a stray dog. It wasn’t uncommon to hear gunshots echoing from the low-income housing projects on either side of the shopping mall. They always left Mari jumpy and wanting to hide in her car, but tonight the neighborhoods were sleeping.
There was a sound of footsteps nearby. A shadowy figure, clad in a long coat, approached out of the fog. Mari’s heart leaped with a thrill of surprise and horror. The figure stepped into the beam cast by the headlights.
“Hey,” Mari said with a smile.
It was Opal Tims.
Mari let out a sigh of relief.
“Are you waiting for someone?” Opal asked.
“I am, actually,” Mari responded. “I was told to wait here, but I don’t know by who.”
“That's interesting,” Opal replied. “I got this letter, and it led me here too.”
“Then we might be waiting for the same person.” Mari smiled. “I’m glad, in a way, because it was awfully spooky standing here alone and I had no idea what to expect.”
Tabasco growled softly. Mari told him to hush.
“Is he always like that?” Opal looked down at Mari's bulldog.
“Sometimes. And then sometimes he eats out of the garbage so…” Mari took a deep breath to calm herself down. She ignored Tabasco's constant growling.
"Dogs," Opal commented. "I'm a cat person myself." She checked the time.
“Well, it looks like we’re finally going to solve this mystery,” Mari said. “I was beginning to think it would never happen. I hope we haven’t made a mistake in coming here.”
“I haven’t made a mistake,” Opal said in an oddly far away voice. She turned to face Mari. “But you probably ha
ve.”
Mari gazed back at her. “What mistake did I make?”
“I think you know,” Opal replied. “Trying to have the Chile Fest shut down. Trying to reverse all of my hard work. Work into which I’ve invested years of my life. Lobbying to destroy the only good thing that’s ever happened in this town. The only thing that binds us together as a community. I can forgive a lot of things, but I can’t forgive that.”
“When did I lobby to end Chile Fest?” Mari questioned her, a note of panic in her voice. “You must be thinking of my brother.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Opal argued, her voice rising to a pitch of hysteria. “You’ve hated me. You’ve always hated me.”
Opal raised a cast-iron skillet and swung it in Mari's direction. Mari ducked, but not fast enough. The pan hit her head with a loud thud. After that, everything else became one giant blur.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Mari didn’t know how long she had been unconscious. When she awoke, it was so dark she could barely make out where she was. It was only through long familiarity that she slowly realized she was sitting in a chair in a front corner of the kitchen at Lito Bueno’s Mexican Restaurant.
Mari tried moving her hand to push her hair out of her face and made a horrifying discovery. She was tied to the chair. Panic surged inside of her. Instinctively she thrashed and struggled, hoping to break free of her ropes, though she knew it was useless. They were far too tight.
“Where am I?” Mari called out in a faint voice. Not the kind of voice that exuded confidence.
“Don’t worry,” came Opal’s voice from the kitchen island behind her. She haphazardly pushed open drawers and opened cabinets. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“Where’s Tabasco?”
“Tabasco is just fine.”
Nothing in those statements did anything to reassure Mari that her dog would remain unharmed. Opal went on humming to herself as she opened the refrigerator door just a crack. Light flooded into the room.
After rummaging in the bottom drawers for some time, Opal emerged holding a green container covered in plastic foil. “Aha!” she said in a tone of triumph.
“Why do you need my salsa?” Mari asked, her voice breaking slightly. “How did you even get in here?”
Ignoring these questions, Opal said, “Now, where do you keep the rat poison?” Her voice was eerily cheerful. Half to herself, she added, “I know it must be around here somewhere.”
“I’ll never tell you,” Mari blurted out.
“So it is in here,” Opal said. "I’ll find it eventually. We’ve got all night.”
“What are you trying to do?” Mari used her legs to push the chair back against the wall, hoping to create the illusion of a scuffle to anyone passing outside. “You’re not seriously thinking of poisoning me.”
“Not just you, my dear, oh no,” Opal said in her lilting voice. “Not just you.”
“You’re insane,” Mari shouted, though realizing even as she said it that she wasn’t doing herself any favors. “Are you the one who poisoned Brandy Davos?”
“Do you expect some kind of trophy?” Opal said. “Of course I killed her. And I’d kill her again if I had to.”
“Brandy Davos was a good person. What did she ever do to hurt you?”
“She wanted to ruin me,” Opal protested. “Brandy knew something I've been hiding since the day I arrived in this town. Unfortunately, Brandy stumbled across a photo of me from ten years ago. It was from an article in the newspaper. I don't know how she found it.”
Right now Mari had only one goal which was to keep Opal distracted with questions for as long as possible while she slowly nudged herself over to the fryer. “But I don’t understand. Why does that matter?”
“The article was about a mental patient who tried to strangle her nurse with a gardening hose. The attempt had failed, of course, but the patient was placed in solitude for weeks. When word leaked out, it created a scandal and eventually the hospital was shut down. All of the patients were moved to new units, except for one.”
“You,” Mari guessed. “You managed to escape.”
“That’s just what I did,” Opal said proudly. “I made my way here on foot, holed up with an ex-boyfriend, changed my name and ID. A few months later, I emerged a new woman, ready to take on the world. And I have.”
“But how did you know about Brandy?”
“Because she’s an idiot," Opal explained. "She called me wanting to talk about it. She said she was going to run my story in the local paper. When I refused to talk, she informed me she was getting ready to run the story anyway, with or without my consent. Obviously, I wasn’t going to let that happen. I had to take action. Poor Brandy should've done her homework. Then she would have found out that I was the patient who tried to strangle that nurse.”
Mari was inches away from the fryer now.
“How did you end up in the hospital in the first place?” Mari asked.
Opal sighed as if the question bored her. “For trying to stab my little brother with a pair of gardening shears.”
“Why would you do that?” Mari only bothered asking to buy more time. It was clear that Opal was insane.
Opal rolled her eyes. “In fairness to me, he deserved it. And, I was five. They shouldn’t have held it against me my entire life. Why was I being kept in an asylum at nineteen for something I had done before I could even tie my own shoes?”
“But you’re not remorseful,” Mari argued. “Even now you don’t regret it. Surely you can see why they would have concerns.”
“You sound like those nurses,” Opal commented. “Growing up in an asylum made everything worse for me.”
Mari had finally reached the fryer. Using her shoulder, she was able to push the side lever up and turn it on.
“Were you the one who left me those notes?” asked Mari continued. "You know, you didn't have to throw a brick through my window."
“I was,” Opal admitted, beaming with evident pride in her voice. “I wanted to get your attention. You were the one person in town I thought I could trust.”
“Trust with what?” Mari kept an eye on the fryer. Since it was broken, it would start to go haywire any minute now.
“With keeping the Chile Fest open, silly,” Opal replied. “Everything I’ve done, every crime I’ve committed, has been in service of my baby. I want this festival to continue for generations. Brandy Davos threatened that. And then you threatened that.”
“How?” asked Mari in a helpless tone.
“By trying to cancel the festival!” Opal spluttered. “By the countless petitions, you posted on the door of your restaurant. You literally made Lito Bueno’s ground zero of the Stop Opal Tims movement.”
By now Opal had found the rat poison in one of the island’s cabinets and was gingerly scooping it into the salsa bowl with a teaspoon, humming a friendly tune as she went.
The fryer hissed crisply, and sparks began to erupt out of it. Opal didn’t seem to notice as she tapped the spoon against the bowl to unloose the last of the poison that was still clinging to it.
“Then are you the one who broke into Katerina’s Restaurant?” Mari went on.
“Looks like you’ve got it all worked out,” Opal responded. “I thought it might intimidate Katerina into ending her little crusade against me, but I failed.” She shrugged. “Oh, well. Katerina won’t be crusading anymore when she gets a taste of this.”
Smoke started filling the room. But Opal was so absorbed in revenge that she didn’t seem to notice.
“The best part is,” Opal said, “you made the salsa that’s going to kill her. Your family is going to be horrified when they find out what you’ve done. How you killed Brandy Davos and Katerina Georgiou in cold blood before taking your own life.”
With a deafening screech, the smoke alarm sounded. Opal screamed and ran to turn it off, but it was too late. Mari sank back in her chair and sighed with relief. The fire department was on its way.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN<
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A week later, the smoke had cleared. Mari and Alex stood in the kitchen making salsa.
They were making a lot of salsa. In a strange quirk of fate, the family’s recipe was suddenly in demand now that the local paper had run its exposé revealing how Opal Tims had tried to poison Mari and half of the town. Mr. Ramirez had despaired that now no one would want to buy their salsa, but in fact, the opposite was true. Everyone wanted to try what they were calling Mari’s Murder Salsa.
“I hope this is enough,” Alex said, banging the last of a lumpy, tomato-filled spoonful into a glass jar. “Lately demand has been so high that it’s been hard to keep up.”
“Not the worst problem to have,” Mari replied.
“We actually haven’t had a lot of problems since Opal was arrested,” Alex pointed out. “Funny how that works.”
“Isn’t it weird how much more stressful life is when there are murderers on the loose?” Mari teased.
“It’s the worst,” Alex responded.
They were silent for a moment while Mari quietly basked in her newfound good fortune. Once again she was a local hero. The family was doing well financially, and no one was even thinking of buying illegal meats to make ends meet. Tabasco had returned—apparently, when Opal knocked Mari out that night, she had just left the dog at the fruit market. Tabasco had wandered through the streets of town until he found his way home.
“So, how’s your love life?” Mari asked, squeezing a sliced lime over her salsa.
“Non-existent at the moment.” Alex shrugged like it was no big deal.
“What a shame,” said Mari said, trying not to say I told you so.
“Make fun all you want, but I was never under any illusions that it was going to work out. It was fun while it lasted, but our tastes are just so completely different. Jia won’t even try Abuela’s tamales if you can believe it.”
“Did you try her food?” Mari asked.
“Yes, I tried it,” Alex said, annoyed. “But if I have to eat another bite of wonton noodle soup, I might have to kill myself. Eating that stuff is murder.”
