License to Dill

by Mary Ellen Hughes

  Piper eyed the syringe uneasily. “What did he ever do to you?” she asked. “I can understand killing Raffaele Conti. But why Frederico?”

  Tucker’s eyes narrowed, his expression hard and one Piper had never seen before on the usually genial man. “He saw me leave the hotel desk that night,” he said. “Yes, I was on duty, despite what I told you. That is, until Conti called about his flat tire. Now back up! And don’t try to sound an alarm. The first person who comes near me gets this.” He held up his syringe.

  Piper nudged Scott to step away and inched along with him. Tucker edged toward them, holding his deadly needle out menacingly. He gestured toward an electrical cord hanging from a silent, blank monitor. Its excess loops coiled on the floor as the plug end lay unused beneath a wall outlet.

  “Pull that out of the monitor and tie her hands behind her with it,” he told Scott. “Then your ankles.”

  “Tucker, you can’t—” Scott began.

  “Do it!” Tucker ordered. Piper saw Scott’s jaw clench tightly. He disconnected the cord from its monitor and reached down for the loops.

  Piper felt her wrists being tied. Playing for time, she said, “Robin hasn’t been working all these years in Baltimore, has she? I spoke to her myself tonight. She’s been getting treatment at Sheppard Pratt. A mental hospital in Baltimore.”

  “It was his fault,” Tucker said, his eyes steely. “Conti’s. She was perfect—a gentle, sensitive girl, and happy—until he came along. She fell for his line, when the whole time he’d been laughing at her. It destroyed her.”

  “It was hard seeing him again at the hotel, wasn’t it?” Piper asked, keeping her tone as calm as she could manage.

  Tucker snorted bitterly. “He was the same coldhearted monster he’d been thirty years ago, playing the same games with every woman he encountered. I could barely stand it. Then he got stranded out on the highway by Standley’s farm. He called the hotel desk and screamed at me, blaming me for getting him a faulty rental. Like I was his menial. The father of the girl he ruined. It was too much. I told him I’d come pick him up, but I stopped at my house first for my gun.”

  Scott had wound the cord around his ankles, and Tucker reached for the remaining loops. “Give it to me, and hold your hands out.”

  Scott did, but when Tucker glanced down, Scott thrust his hands upward, catching Tucker’s jaw hard and knocking him backward.

  “Scott, no!” Piper cried. She saw that Tucker hadn’t dropped his syringe, and though he’d fallen against a cart that rolled backward, he was scrambling to regain his balance.

  Scott quickly freed his feet and stepped in front of Piper, whose hands were still tied, though not tightly. As she struggled to free them, Tucker rose unsteadily to his feet.

  “Watch out!” Piper cried.

  “Stay back,” Scott ordered her as he snatched one of the pillow bolsters from the side of Frederico’s bed and held it in front of him. Tucker lunged, but Scott managed to block the attack. Piper shook off the last of her bindings and glanced worriedly at Frederico, whose bed had been jostled.

  “I’ll kill you with this if you don’t get out of my way,” Tucker cried, brandishing his needle.

  In response, Scott thrust hard with his bolster, pushing Tucker toward the wall. He couldn’t hope to pin him there, Piper knew. Not without something solid. Something that would keep that deadly needle out of reach of them all. But what? They were in a hospital room, not an armory.

  Tucker, leaning backward against the wall, kicked out wildly. He caught one of Scott’s knees, knocking him off balance. Taking his advantage, he shoved forward, knocking Scott to the floor.

  Seeing Tucker raise his syringe, Piper reached for the monitor whose cord Scott used and hurled it at Tucker. It caught him in the head, hard, and he fell to the side, the two men becoming a tangle of limbs. But Tucker kept hold of his syringe and he twisted toward Scott, ready to strike.

  “No!” Piper cried. But the needle sank into Scott’s arm.

  32

  “What’s going on here?” two hospital security guards demanded from the doorway, a fleet of nurses and orderlies gathered behind them.

  “This man needs help!” Piper cried, pointing to Scott. “Quick! That syringe in his arm. He’s been stabbed with something deadly by the man in the white coat. I don’t know with what.”

  Scott looked woozy but alive, thank goodness. But for how long?

  The guards acted quickly, rushing in and restraining Don Tucker, who seemed to have run out of fight. Scott, on the other hand, looked, to Piper’s eyes, worse by the second. “What did you inject him with?” she begged of Tucker. “Tell me.”

  Tucker, on his feet with his arms held behind him, looked at her. He said nothing for excruciating seconds, then exhaled, a defeated man. “Thorazine. He’ll be okay. It would have killed the soccer player with the sedation that was already in his system. But your friend will sleep it off.”

  Relief flooded Piper, and she stepped aside as nurses hurried in to attend to Scott and to Frederico. The guards walked Tucker out, and she followed, unanswered questions still nagging at her.

  “What did you do with the gun?” she asked when they stopped to lock handcuffs on Tucker’s wrists.

  “Tossed it in Warren’s Pond. Along with Conti’s cell phone.” He laughed humorlessly. “The phone was a disposable.”

  Piper remembered Warren’s Pond as the location where Denise said Conti had attacked her. Ironic that his murder weapon ended up there.

  “I didn’t intend to shoot him, you know,” Tucker said. “Not at first. I wanted to make him listen as I spelled out exactly what kind of a fiend I thought he was. But when I said Robin’s name, I could see he didn’t even remember her. He’d wrecked my little girl’s life and her name meant nothing to him? That did it. When I took aim, he turned and ran into the dill field. Like the rabbit he really was.”

  The guards urged him forward, and Piper stayed put. Over his shoulder Tucker said, “Tell Robin I love her.”

  Piper shook her head, thinking what a horrible, twisted way he had of showing love. She pitied Tucker’s daughter, who now had one more thing to deal with in an already unhappy life.

  “Robin Tucker was in a mental hospital?” Emma Leahy asked, struggling to wrap her head around the events of the night before. She’d shown up at Piper’s Picklings first thing Tuesday morning.

  “She started inpatient treatment at Sheppard Pratt in Baltimore,” Piper said, “the summer after high school graduation. Don Tucker and his wife told everyone she’d gone off to college early, hoping that would truly be the case in time. Robin told me it was a tougher battle than any of them expected. She also said her problems had begun before Raffaele Conti, but that she’d been in a very vulnerable place when she became involved with him. Her father totally blamed Conti.”

  Emma drew herself up with a huff, clearly blaming Conti as well. “I had no idea. Joanie, either. The poor thing. And Don and Lois feeling they needed to keep it secret all these years.” She shook her head.

  “Robin stayed in Baltimore to continue treatment on an outpatient basis and even got a job, so that much was true. But the job was minimum wage, and she needed financial help. She also was mugged on the streets once, ending up in the hospital, which only added to her needs. That might be why Don went back to work after initially retiring. She said her father blamed Conti for the mugging, too, since she wouldn’t have been where she was if not for him.”

  “Don did go down to visit her,” Emma said, “but he always claimed Robin’s work wouldn’t allow her time to come to Cloverdale. We all thought she must be doing some really high-end corporate job. You know, one of those eighteen-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week careers. When anyone asked for details, Don would just laugh and claim he never understood it well enough to explain. That should have clued us in, right there. Don was a professional man, a pharma
cist. He would have understood.”

  “It was because he was a pharmacist that he was able to fool everyone about being poisoned,” Gil Williams said, stepping out of Piper’s back room with a fresh mug of coffee. He’d arrived at Piper’s Picklings earlier than Emma and already knew the full story. “Don knew what and how much to ingest to make himself sick enough to be taken to the hospital but not sick enough to be incapacitated. Having worked at the hospital, he knew its routines and how to slip around unnoticed.”

  “Thank heavens you figured it out, Piper, in time to stop Don from committing another murder. I suppose he was the one who caused that boy’s terrible accident out on the road?”

  “I’m sure he was,” Piper said. “Don told me Frederico had seen him leave the hotel desk at the time Conti would have been stranded with his flat tire. Don had lied to me earlier, claiming he hadn’t worked the late shift at the hotel the night of the murder. But Phil contradicted that when I spoke to him last night. He said Don had been stuck on that third shift for weeks. Luckily, I managed to connect those two statements in time and catch Don’s lie.

  “I don’t know,” she added, “why Frederico would have been in the hotel lobby so late that night—”

  “Freddy went down looking for something to eat,” Miranda said, having come into the shop at that moment. “He told me so himself.”

  “How is he?” Piper asked, surprised but pleased to see her.

  “Much better. When I heard what happened, I rushed over first thing this morning to check on him myself. Freddy was awake and talking.”

  “Wonderful!” Emma cried.

  “He’s still not up to speed,” Miranda said. “And he was totally oblivious to what went on in his room last night. But he did know it was Mr. Tucker who tried to kill him on the road. Frederico is a real car buff. He had a long talk with Mr. Tucker, once, about his ten-year-old Dodge Caliber, checking it inside and out. He knew that car.”

  “That’s the second reason Tucker had for getting into the hospital and silencing the young man,” Gil said. “Before Frederico could recover enough to tell anyone. I’m sure the sheriff is checking Tucker’s car for evidence.”

  “That must have been why Don was walking everywhere lately,” Piper said. “He couldn’t take a chance that his car would be identified. Josiah Borkman saw the vehicle that ran Frederico off the road and told me he’d heard a definite whine coming from worn wheel bearings. And I,” she said, grimacing, “passed that information on to Tucker.”

  “Worse than that,” Emma said, “I was the one that told Don that Frederico was improving and where he’d been moved to.”

  “We all trusted him,” Piper said. “We had no reason not to.”

  “Well, it’s over now,” Miranda said. “And my dad is no longer a suspect, thanks to you, Piper.”

  “It was a group effort, definitely,” Piper said. “If Amy hadn’t tracked down a way to contact Robin . . .” She trailed off, unwilling to voice the awful “might have been.” A glance at the others, though, told her they all realized that Frederico would be dead, Gerald Standley might have gone to prison, and who knew how many others Don Tucker would have felt the need to eliminate in order to keep his secret.

  Emma, Miranda, and Gil took off, heading their separate ways, but Piper’s shop didn’t simply settle down to a normal business day. Besides multiple townspeople stopping in for firsthand accounts, Aunt Judy popped in later in the morning, loaded with home-cooked food. Piper had spoken with her aunt and uncle the night before, explaining all that had happened and assuring them she was fine. By the looks of it, her aunt had stayed up the rest of the night cooking. Piper shook her head at the stack of foil-wrapped casserole dishes she carried in with her.

  “They’re not all for you,” Aunt Judy said, laughing. “One is for Gerald and Denise. I was going to drop it at their place, but Denise said they were heading to the hospital to see Frederico. They planned to stop here afterward, so I said I’d leave it with you.”

  “They’re both going to the hospital?”

  “Yes, isn’t that nice? Gerald seems to have unbent with regards to Frederico.”

  “I’m so glad. Who gets the other casserole?”

  “Scott. I checked, and he’s in his office. Since it’s so nearby—”

  “He’s at his office?” Piper asked, shocked. “I left him at the hospital last night and thought he’d still be there.”

  “Oh no. Scott said he got a very good sleep—the sedative, you know—and checked himself out first thing this morning. He grabbed a taxi to get back. He said to tell you he’ll pick up his car keys sometime today. Anyway, I thought he might appreciate a little home-cooked food. He certainly deserves much more for what he did last night.”

  “He acted very courageously,” Piper said. “He quite surprised me.”

  “Have you, um, spoken to Will yet about it all?”

  Piper knew what her aunt was asking. How was Will going to feel about Scott getting the chance to play the hero? “Only briefly. We’re going to talk more later.”

  “Oh good. In the meantime, let me take one of these dishes up to your refrigerator. It’s one of your favorites. Turkey tetrazzini.”

  “Thanks, Aunt Judy.” Piper gave her aunt a peck on the cheek as she took the dish from her. “I’ll do it.”

  Piper was rearranging things in her refrigerator to make room for Aunt Judy’s turkey tetrazzini when she heard familiar voices from downstairs. Denise and Gerald Standley had arrived. Quickly slipping the casserole into the fridge, she hurried back down.

  “There she is!” Denise Standley said. Denise looked wonderful, her hair fluffed and the bloom back in her face. She rushed over and threw her arms around Piper. “How can we thank you?”

  Gerald joined her, taking Piper’s hand and pumping it. “We owe you a great debt.”

  “Not at all,” Piper said, happy to see the deep shadows gone from the dill farmer’s eyes. “I’ll just be glad to get your lovely dill again. My supply is running low.”

  “You got it.”

  “The sheriff’s team dragged Warren’s Pond this morning,” Denise said. “They found the gun. Or, rather, they found a gun. They’ll have to check to see if it’s the one that fired the fatal shot. But Sheriff Carlyle said he can see it hasn’t been in the water long. And the serial number will show if it was Don’s.”

  “Excellent!” Aunt Judy cried. “Now you can take down those barricades from your driveway and just get back to your everyday work.”

  “You don’t know how good that sounds,” Gerald said. “Getting back to work. I’ll never grumble again about getting up at the crack of dawn.”

  “Oh yes you will,” Denise said, laughing, and Gerald joined in. It sounded wonderful to Piper, who not that long ago had witnessed the couple’s grim low point.

  “I still don’t know what happened to my own gun,” Gerald said, “which was careless of me in the extreme. I’m determined to find it.”

  “And when you do, we’ll lock it up safely,” Denise said.

  “How is Frederico doing?” Aunt Judy asked.

  “Getting better by the minute,” Denise said. Her smile faded. “I can’t believe Don Tucker was ready to kill him.”

  “The boy’s been through a lot,” Gerald said. “But he’s managed to stay positive. I give him a lot of credit.”

  Well, that’s encouraging, Piper thought. A glance at Aunt Judy told her she felt the same.

  “He’ll need plenty of therapy,” Denise added. “We’ve invited him to stay with us once he’s released from the hospital, to continue his recovery.”

  Even more encouraging.

  Gerald nodded but didn’t add more. Piper predicted, though, that he’d be kicking a soccer ball around the field with Frederico when the time came. And who knew what would develop after that?

  The Standleys left,
taking Aunt Judy’s casserole and calling out more thanks to both her and Piper.

  “I’ll take this last dish over to Scott,” Aunt Judy said. “It’s the smallest because it has to fit in his little office refrigerator.” At that point Amy walked in, ready for her regular shift.

  Taking Amy’s arrival as a sign, Piper said, “Why don’t I walk over with you to Scott’s, Aunt Judy? Mind watching the shop, Amy? I know you must have plenty of questions about last night, but I’ll just be a minute.”

  “That’s fine,” Amy said cheerfully. She slipped off her light jacket to hang in the back room.

  “Scott needs his car keys,” Piper said, dropping them into her pocket, “and I’ll get to see his new office, which I’ve never gotten around to doing, though he’s invited me a few times.” After what he’d just gone through because of her, Piper felt she owed Scott at least that courtesy. Arriving with her aunt, on the other hand, would keep things a little more . . . what? Casual? Noncommittal? Her thoughts regarding Scott had become a bit confused.

  When they walked in a few minutes later, Scott popped up from the small desk in his outer office. “Hey, great! Good to see you!”

  “And to see you,” Aunt Judy said. “I’ve brought the potato and ham casserole I promised.”

  “And I brought your keys,” Piper said.

  “Terrific,” Scott said, taking both and setting the dish on the desk. “How do you like the new digs?” he asked.

  “Very nice,” Piper said and gazed approvingly at the simply but smartly decorated reception area, which still had a fresh-paint-and-new-carpet smell to it.

  “More chairs are on their way,” Scott said, explaining the relative emptiness. “And this will be my assistant’s desk—once I get an assistant. Come see the rest.”