by Penny Pike
Yeah, sure, I thought, laughing inside at his verbal clichés. His writing wasn’t much different. But he made his point—he had no intention of telling me anything.
Well, two could play that game.
“That’s what I heard too. But my aunt was talking to some of the other food truckers and she heard the guy was hit over the head with something heavy.”
It didn’t take ESP on my part to figure out “bludgeoned to death” meant “hit over the head with something heavy.”
Trevor took another look at Aunt Abby and asked, “How did you get that information? Who’s your source?”
“Oh, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” Aunt Abby said, smiling sweetly. I’ll say one thing for her—she caught on fast.
“Okay, listen,” Trevor said, leaning in conspiratorially. “I’ll tell you what I know—if you’ll give me a name.”
I glanced at Aunt Abby. She nodded.
“You first,” I said. “How exactly did Boris die?”
He glanced around at the milling crowd and lowered his voice. “This is what the cop told me. They think Obregar left his truck for a few minutes, probably for a bathroom or coffee break. His assistant, Cherry”—he looked at his notes—“Washington. She was gone for the night. When he came back, he must have discovered someone inside waiting for him. Cops found the place turned upside down. They think the killer was going through Obregar’s stuff, but they don’t know why. When Obregar caught him, the killer grabbed a can of ground pepper and threw a handful at the chef’s face, blinding him. Cops found pepper all over him. They figured the chef bent over, probably in pain; then the killer beaned him.”
“With what?” I asked, picturing a meat hammer or even a small appliance.
“Get this,” Trevor said, almost laughing as he spoke. “It was some kind of frozen animal! The cop wouldn’t say what exactly, but they found a wrapped-up package of meat lying next to him on the floor when Obregar was discovered. Bizarre, right?”
I hadn’t seen the morbid streak in Trevor when I was dating him. Interesting what a murder will bring out in someone.
“You sure it was meat?” I asked, remembering the package Tripp had passed to Boris.
“Yep. Pretty clever.”
Not so clever that Roald Dahl hadn’t already used that method in one of his books. Alfred Hitchcock had even featured a similar story in his TV show. A leg of lamb, I think it was. The murderer cooked it and served it to the police investigating her. Talk about clever.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“Hey, that’s a lot,” Trevor said. He flipped a page of his notebook, ready to take down my words. “So spill your intel. Who’s your source? And I’ll want a number.”
This time I leaned in and lowered my voice. “Call Wellesley Shelton. He’s full of ‘intel.’ You can reach him at the SFPD, or dial nine-one-one.”
I took Aunt Abby’s hand, and we made a hasty retreat to the Coffee Witch. I could only imagine the angry look on Trevor’s face as I left him standing there with his open notebook.
After all the times he’d lied to me, it served him right. They say revenge is best served cold—as in cold-blooded. They were right.
Chapter 11
“That wasn’t very nice, Darcy,” my aunt said as I led her to the Coffee Witch for a jolt of caffeine. She protested, saying she wanted to search for Dillon, but I told her he’d show up when he was ready. Besides, it was around eight thirty and I needed the caffeine. Plus, my aunt could use the distraction.
“You don’t know Trevor, Aunt Abby. I wasted two years of my life with him before I realized it was all about him. He’ll do anything to get a story, even step on his own girlfriend. I just outsmarted him this time, but I’m sure he’ll get even somehow. He’s not one to forget when he’s been dissed.”
“I always thought he was kind of cute. But looks can be deceiving, I guess.”
“You got that right,” I said. What I didn’t say was that my aunt’s innocent face also hid another side of her personality. Beneath that Betty White smile and those Shirley Temple dimples lay a savvy senior citizen with a mind as sharp as a kitchen knife.
“Well, I think he’s still sweet on you. After all, you’re the one who broke up with him. I’m sure he carries a torch for you.”
“Oh God, please, Aunt Abby! The only person he’s sweet on is himself.”
Aunt Abby looked at me with those twinkling eyes. “Speaking of being sweet on someone . . .”
I shot her a glance. “What?”
My aunt shrugged. “I’m just saying, you’ve been eating a lot of cream puffs lately.”
“Are you saying I’m getting fat?”
Aunt Abby gave me a sly grin. “You know what I mean.”
“Listen, I’m not ready to even think about anyone in a romantic way, Jake Miller included.”
“Uh-huh,” Aunt Abby said.
“Stop it! I just happen to love his cream puffs.”
“I noticed.” Aunt Abby stepped into the coffee line behind a half dozen other caffeine addicts.
“You’re . . . despicable!” I said, quoting Daffy Duck, only without the lisp. It was the only word I could think of at the moment, and it fit her perfectly.
Several coffee worshippers around us eyed me as if I’d just confessed to murder. Aunt Abby flashed them a toothy smile. I wanted to wipe that silly grin off her face, but I bit my tongue, afraid the mob nearby would accuse me of elder abuse. She was so working this innocent act.
“Speaking of Jake,” my aunt said, “I wonder where he’s disappeared to. I haven’t seen him since he finished talking with the detective.”
“Yeah. I wonder what he learned from his chat with Detective Shelton,” I added. “Maybe he went back to his cream puff truck.”
“No,” Aunt Abby said, shaking her head. “The cops aren’t letting us back in yet. I don’t know how they expect us to make any money, but they’re taking their sweet time removing that crime scene tape. Those crab mac and cheeses don’t make themselves, you know.”
I turned to her. “So what did you tell the detective when you talked to him?”
“Just that I was home at the time of the murder,” she said with a casual wave of her hand.
Home alone, I thought. With no alibi. Again. I wondered how she remained so unconcerned.
“Nothing else?” I asked, sensing there was more behind her casual attitude.
She sighed. “He told me he’d have more questions for me later, but I really don’t know what else I can tell him.”
“Any chance he told you who found the body?” Like Jake Miller?
She shook her head and moved forward with the line.
“He asked me if I had any idea who killed Boris. I mentioned the poison-pen letters he’d received. I told him that if he found the writer of those letters, he’d probably have his murderer.”
The back of my neck prickled. “What did he say to that?”
“He said anyone could have sent those letters—even me.”
Great, I thought. My aunt still wasn’t off the hook. Before I could respond, we reached the front of the line and Willow the Coffee Witch was asking for our orders. I ordered a Spirited Mocha—two shots of espresso—and turned to my aunt. “What would you like?”
“Do they have Sanka?”
I frowned at her. “No, Aunt Abby. They only have real coffee. How about a Cara-Magical-Cino or something?”
“That’s just an overpriced chocolate milk shake,” she replied.
I returned my attention to Willow. “She’ll have that magical one. Make it decaf, please.”
“Now it’s an overpriced impotent chocolate milk shake,” Aunt Abby grumbled under her breath.
While Willow made our drinks to order, I turned back to Aunt Abby. “Think for a minute. Did the detective say anything more ab
out how Boris was killed or what exactly happened?” I wanted to see if she could confirm the information I’d already learned.
“No, but while we were talking, one of the technicians brought over something in a plastic lunch bag and showed it to the detective. Said she found it in the trash.”
A chill ran down my back. A clue? “Did you see it?”
Aunt Abby nodded. “When she held it up, it looked like a small container. I couldn’t read the label, but—”
Willow reached through the window and handed me my extra-spirited drink along with Aunt Abby’s impotent potion. I took both of them, paid, and led my aunt to one of the benches nearby. We sat down and I gave Aunt Abby her “coffee.”
“But what?” I said, after taking a sip of the soothing hot coffee mixture. I felt my insides wake up.
“What?” Aunt Abby said, licking the froth from her lip after several gulps of her chilly drink.
“You were saying something about what they found.”
“Oh yes. I said I couldn’t read the label, but it had a skull and crossbones on it. I assume it was some kind of poison.”
The warmth inside me turned cold.
Poison?
I remembered that Aunt Abby’s container of rat poison had gone missing from her truck. What were the odds it was the one the tech had found in the trash? If it was hers, then it probably had her fingerprints all over it.
So how did it end up in the nearby Dumpster?
I sipped my coffee, but suddenly it tasted like poison and I set it down. While Aunt Abby had no trouble slurping down her drink, we sat in silence and watched the police and technicians continue to do their work. I noticed the crowd that had gathered earlier had dissipated considerably, probably because the drama was over and the cops were being tight-lipped about the details—except to my aunt, who seemed to know all kinds of confidential information.
A man holding a small paper bag and a newspaper sat down next to me on the bench. He looked like one of the several homeless people who shuffled around the area, hoping for monetary handouts from the tourists and leftover morsels from the food trucks. He wore a tattered and dirty Columbo-style trench coat over baggy jeans, and a frayed Giants baseball cap adorned his head. A pair of taped-together sunglasses covered his eyes and a scraggly two-day growth of stubble seemed more a shaving oversight than a deliberate style statement. When he coughed, it was all I could do not to run away from the germs he’d just expelled.
Then I looked down at his feet.
It was the shoes that gave him away: Reef thongs. The kind with the hidden church key in the sole.
“Oh my God! Dillon!” I blurted.
Aunt Abby looked over. “Dillon?” she repeated, blinking as if to clear her eyes.
“Shhh!” Dillon hushed us, then glanced around. “I’m undercover. I don’t want anyone to recognize me.”
I almost laughed at his cloak-and-dagger disguise. All he needed were some Groucho glasses and a fake mustache to complete the look. “What are you doing?” I asked, shaking my head.
Aunt Abby got up and moved to the other side of the bench to sit next to him. “Dillon! Where have you been?” she whispered loudly. “You had me frantic! And why are you dressed like a hobo?”
“I don’t want the cops to see me.”
“Then why are you here?” I asked, relieved he was okay but still amused at his getup. “The cops are crawling all over the place. There’s been another murder—right next door to your mom’s bus. She’s been worried sick!”
“I know. That’s why I’m here,” he said mysteriously.
“What do you mean, you ‘know’?” I asked.
“I heard it on the police scanner.”
“You have a police scanner?” I asked.
He nodded and pulled out his cell phone. “There’s an app for that.”
Of course. If only I had the “Solve a Murder” app.
“So you must know what happened to Chef Boris,” Aunt Abby said to him.
He took my coffee from my hand and downed a gulp, then made a face as if he’d tasted a lemon. “How can you drink this stuff?”
“It’s better than those energy drinks you pour down your throat,” I said, taking back my coffee, even though I didn’t have the stomach to finish it. “Dillon, what’s going on with you? Does your recent disappearance have anything to do with Chef Boris’s death?”
“God, no! Are you psycho?” He pulled down the sunglasses and looked at me as if I were crazy. I’d gotten a lot of odd looks today.
I shrugged. “No, but I’m beginning to wonder if you are.”
“I’ve been doing some undercover work on the Net,” he explained, his voice low.
“What did you find out?” Aunt Abby said, leaning in.
“Well, it seems that Chef Boris has a little history.”
My skin prickled. “Like what?”
“Like he’s got a record,” Dillon said.
Aunt Abby’s eyes lit up with excitement. “What did he do? Was it murder?”
“No,” Dillon said. “But he spent time in prison a few years ago for dealing drugs.”
I sat back. It wasn’t the bombshell I thought it might be. Then again, drug dealing wasn’t exactly nothing. Did Boris’s past life have something to do with his murder? Maybe he was back in the business again, selling drugs through his food truck, and things went sour, as they say on TV.
But if that were true, how did it tie in with the death of Oliver Jameson?
Before I could ask more questions, someone tapped me on my shoulder. I jumped a foot, wrenching my sore arm and shoulder, and cried out in pain.
“Sorry, Darcy. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Jake!” Aunt Abby said. “We’ve been looking for you. Where did you disappear to?”
I rubbed my sore shoulder. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Dillon had slunk down, like a turtle trying to pull its head into its shell. He was staring at the ground.
“Dillon?” Jake said, peering at him.
I laughed. “What, the 1950s spy disguise didn’t fool you, Jake?”
Dillon looked up from under the brim of his ragged cap and glared at me.
“Shh,” I said, mocking Dillon’s earlier attempt to remain undetected. “He’s undercover.”
“Shut up, Darcy!” Dillon said. “This is serious! If the feds find out I’ve been hacking again, I could go to prison for a long time. I’m just trying to help my mom. Jeez.”
I hung my head apologetically. “I’m sorry, Dillon. It’s just that you look so funny in that disguise. Maybe next time you could lose the Columbo trench coat and Giants baseball cap, and wear a Sherlock Holmes cape and deerstalker hat. To tell you the truth, it was your shoes that gave you away. Reef sandals? Seriously?”
“Jake,” Aunt Abby interjected, “Dillon was just telling us about Boris Obregar’s criminal history. Did you know he was a—”
“Drug dealer?” Jake said, finishing her sentence and stealing her thunder. “Yeah. I have a friend who’s a cop. He mentioned it.”
Dillon looked downright crestfallen to hear that Jake already knew about Boris. All that work illegally hacking the Internet, risking arrest and imprisonment, and Jake had gotten the information from a cop friend.
“Well, that’s not all I learned,” Dillon huffed. “Did you know his assistant, Cherry Washington, has been in and out of rehab for years?”
Jake shook his head. “Interesting. I don’t know her that well, but a frequenter of rehab facilities working for a former drug dealer doesn’t sound like a good mix. I assume the police talked to her.”
Judging from the blank faces, it appeared no one knew. I wondered if Cherry might have a motive to kill Boris but had no idea what it might be. And again, what was the connection to Oliver Jameson? Did he have anything to do with dealing drugs?
“Jake, what else did your cop friend have to say?” I asked.
“Only that he heard Boris was killed with a hunk of frozen meat from his own freezer,” Jake said. He eyed me. “You don’t seem surprised, Darcy.”
“She already knew that,” Aunt Abby said. “Her old boyfriend told her.”
“Old boyfriend?” Jake asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Ex-boyfriend. Trevor O’Gara,” I said.
“He’s a hotshot reporter at the newspaper,” Aunt Abby added. “Apparently he found out about the weapon from one of the cops at the scene.”
“Hardly hotshot,” I mumbled.
Jake said nothing.
Hmm, I thought. Was there a hint of jealousy in those dark brown eyes? Maybe Aunt Abby was right. Maybe Jake didn’t give out his special cream puffs to just every girl. Or maybe I was reading way too much in those eyes of his.
“Oh, I almost forgot!” I said, breaking out of the brief daydream. “So did your cop friend happen to know who found the body?”
“Nope,” Jake said. “But I do.”
“Who?” Dillon asked.
I waited for Jake to confirm the rumor.
He pressed his lips together, then said, “You’re looking at him.”
• • •
Less than an hour later the police tape was lifted from around the perimeter of the food trucks. The only tape that remained circled Boris’s Road Grill truck. Aunt Abby and Jake returned to their mobile businesses to prep for customers who still lingered in the area. As a former reporter, I knew that news like a murder can work two ways. The notoriety can taint businesses and even kill them, or the publicity can attract customers and make the businesses flourish. We’d have to see how the food trucks survived after the double homicides, but my guess was the vendors would have a record sales day. There’s nothing like a taste of crime to bring out the hungry ambulance chasers and thirsty rubberneckers.
Naturally, Dillon disappeared again, claiming he had more “investigating” to do, but he promised to keep in touch so his mother wouldn’t worry. I spent the rest of the day helping Aunt Abby by taking orders from the onslaught of the festival crowd. By seven o’clock, my feet hurt from standing, my neck ached from craning out of the School Bus window, and my arm throbbed from the pain of my earlier fall, giving me little time to ponder the murders. But by the time I got back to the RV, my mind was spinning like a whisk with all that had happened.
