Midnight Snacks are Murder

by Libby Klein

  “Mr. Ricardo,” Mrs. Dodson went on. “We are looking for a woman.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Mr. Ricardo kicked his hip out. “Hey!”

  I stepped in. “Mr. Ricardo, do you remember me? I’m Ginny Frankowski’s niece?” We had to move backwards to the beat to keep facing him.

  Mr. Ricardo kept leading the conga line while talking. “Ah yes, of course. How is Ginny? I keep telling her to run away with me. Hey!”

  “Well, that’s just it. We can’t find her. We were hoping you might know where she is.”

  Mr. Ricardo stopped in his tracks and broke out of the conga line. They kept moving around the room without him. “Ginny is missing? My little red hen?”

  Mrs. Dodson grabbed his hand. “Do you know where she is, man? We’re running out of time.”

  “Are you sure she isn’t sleepwalking again?”

  Mrs. Dodson sighed. “She isn’t on that medicine anymore, and she’s been gone all day.”

  “Mr. Ricardo, we’ve been looking for well over an hour, and we still have no idea where she could be. Do you have any ideas?”

  “I may have one. Come on.”

  Mr. Ricardo took me by the wrist and led me outside. “Where’s your car?”

  I took him to the church van, where he climbed over a couple of ladies and sat between Mrs. Davis and Georgina. He gave them each a big smile. “Hellooo, ladies. Do I smell whiskey?”

  Mrs. Dodson pulled out her cookies and they did another round. Georgina giggled when they came to her.

  “What is your idea, Mr. Ricardo?”

  Mr. Ricardo had one arm around Mrs. Davis and one around Georgina. “About what?”

  I felt the hopelessness rising up from deep within me. “For finding Aunt Ginny.”

  “Oh, right. Ginny and I often go to the Court House Diner after dancing. She loves their red velvet pancakes.”

  “Court House Diner. Okay.” I put the van into drive and we were off again. Although I feared it was just another fruitless lap of a very long wild-goose chase.

  Sawyer rubbed my shoulder. “We’ll find her.”

  I looked in the rearview mirror. I was starting to suspect my occupants thought I was driving a party bus.

  “Poppy, honey, do the police have any other suspects?” Mother Gibson called up from the back.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know that they are looking for other suspects, but I know Mr. Brandt had trouble at work with one of his bosses, and the other one of his bosses had a jealous boyfriend who may have threatened him.”

  “Oooh, tell me more about that.” Mrs. Davis crocheted another row on her blanket.

  I filled them in about Judy and Ken, about the embezzlement charge and the charity angle. And about Kylie and her boyfriend, Frank Trippett.

  “Wait,” Mrs. Davis interrupted. “Frank Trippett who works as a mechanic?”

  “Yes, do you know him?”

  “I know of him. I know he used to be married to Helen Sheer’s daughter, Olivia.”

  Mrs. Dodson groaned. “That scoundrel? I didn’t know that was his name, but I’ve heard Helen talk about him often enough.”

  Sawyer turned in her seat to face the back of the van again. “What do you know about him, Mrs. Davis?”

  “Well”—Mrs. Davis’s crochet needles moved in time to her words—“I know he put Olivia in the hospital a few times. Once he broke three of her ribs because dinner was cold when he got home. She was finally able to divorce him, but she had to move out to the Midwest to keep him from finding her.”

  Mrs. Dodson added, “Helen gets twelve cards a year from the girl. One for every holiday in every month. Their whole life was turned upside-down by that wicked man.”

  Sawyer turned back to me. “If Frank Trippett was abusive to his first wife, he’s probably abusive to Kylie.”

  “And if he’s that violent,” I said, “I bet he’d be capable of killing out of jealousy.”

  We pulled into the Court House Diner parking lot. I was about to go into the old-fashioned diner with its black-and-white checkered linoleum floor and tabletop jukeboxes, when I saw a familiar pair walking toward the car next to us. I rolled down the window. “Mr. and Mrs. Sheinberg, what are you doing all the way out here?”

  I hadn’t seen them since I’d had to apologize for Aunt Ginny stealing Mrs. Sheinberg’s rooster pot holder.

  Mrs. Sheinberg was small and stooped from years of working hunched over in her family’s Jewish bakery. She had beady black eyes that noticed everything. “Hiya, bubula, what’s this you’re doin’? You chaperoning an old-fogey field trip?” She snickered to herself.

  Mr. Sheinberg was tanned and wrinkled, with a nose too big for his face and a fluffy tuft of white hair on the top of his head like he was always having a 1980s sort of hair day. He reminded me of a Silkie chicken. He looked in the window and saw Mr. Ricardo in the midst of the ladies. “Uh-oh. Rooster in the hen house!”

  Mr. Ricardo replied, “Hey-yo!”

  Mr. Sheinberg answered my earlier question. “Pancakes.” He jutted his thumb at Mrs. Sheinberg. “This one loves the chocolate chip pancakes. She could eat a longshoreman under the table.”

  Mrs. Sheinberg smacked his arm. “He don’t know. You here for the pancakes too?”

  “No, I’m looking for Aunt Ginny. She’s missing.”

  “Uh-oh.” Mr. Sheinberg scrunched his mouth up. “She isn’t on the lam, is she?”

  “Are you sure she isn’t sleepwalking again?” Mrs. Sheinberg asked.

  To which the whole van said in unison, “She doesn’t take that medicine anymore, and she’s been gone all day.”

  Mrs. Sheinberg took a step back. “Oh. Okay. Not sleepwalking then.”

  Mr. Sheinberg pointed to the diner. “Well, she isn’t in there, is she, pook?”

  Mrs. Sheinberg shook her head. “Uh-uh. We’d a seen her if she was. And we were there, like, what?” She looked at Mr. Sheinberg.

  “An hour.”

  “Yeah, an hour so …”

  “All right, thank you. Drive safe going home.”

  “You too, bubula. Be careful with that band of meshugas you got there.”

  “I will, Mrs. Sheinberg, thank you.”

  I addressed my little troupe of helpers. “Well, I’m out of ideas. Where else do you think we should look?”

  The van was silent for a minute. Then Mr. Ricardo asked, “Wait, who are we looking for?”

  Mrs. Dodson leaned forward and informed him, “We are looking for Ginny, you old fool.”

  Sawyer and I shook our heads.

  So I made a decision. “We should probably get the van back before the church people notice it’s gone and report it stolen.”

  From the back of the van there came a chorus of awws. Then someone suggested we look for Aunt Ginny at the Chippendales-style male strip club, Sausage King. I couldn’t prove it, but I was sure that suggestion came from Georgina, who was drinking her twelfth whiskey ball. Everyone vigorously agreed except Mr. Ricardo, who tried to make the point that those men weren’t real dancers. To which Mrs. Davis asked, “Oh, do they dance too?”

  I feared that I was losing control when I was saved by a call from Itty Bitty Smitty.

  “She’s home!”

  “Thank God, are you sure?”

  “Yep. She’s right here. I stopped in just to check, thinking maybe she’d come back home, and there she was. Just sitting on the couch petting the cat.”

  I moved the phone away from my mouth and told the van, “Aunt Ginny is home!” A cheer went up. I told Smitty, “Don’t call Amber yet, I’m on my way.”

  “You got it, boss. Nyuck-nyuck-nyuck.”

  I hung up the phone and put the van in drive. I was heading back to Wildwood to start unloading crazies.

  “So, about that nudie club?” Mother Gibson wanted to know.

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get home to Aunt Ginny and find out what happened today. Plus there is this matter of the eyewitness to deal with.�
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  Everyone was disappointed to have the evening cut short. Well, everyone who was liquored up on whiskey cookies, that is. I was so relieved I started to cry again.

  “I tell you what,” Sawyer suggested. “Let me take you and Georgina to get your car so you can get home. Then I’ll drop everyone else off. I can get a ride home from the bowling alley.”

  “Who are you going to get to pick you up from Wildwood?”

  “Don’t you worry about that. I have someone.”

  I didn’t have the emotional strength to disagree, so I let Sawyer return me and Georgina to the Senior Center. I got out of the van and Mrs. Davis said to me, “This was fun. We should do it again sometime.”

  Mrs. Dodson added, “Only maybe the next time without the missing person or murder investigations.”

  Everyone agreed that that would be best.

  Georgina stumbled over to the wrong car and tried to open the passenger door. “I shink ish locked.”

  I held my key up and hit the lock button so my car chirped from two doors down.

  Georgina tried to get in again. “Noishnot working.”

  I chirped the lock again. “Try it now.”

  Georgina tried pulling the door harder.

  I laughed and let out some of the tension I’d been carrying. I was so relieved that Aunt Ginny was alive and safe. I had to catch my breath and calm my emotions. Because now that I wasn’t afraid anymore, I was going to go home and kill her myself.

  Chapter 40

  “Atlantic City!”

  Aunt Ginny paused in her petting of Figaro when she realized the tone of my voice was not casual.

  “What is wrong with you?! Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in?”

  “What?” Aunt Ginny shrugged. “What’s the big deal? I saw the senior bus trip to the casinos listed in the Shoppee. It sounded like fun. I was back by midnight.”

  I paced back and forth in front of the little redhead-now-purple-head, who was dressed in a silver sequined tank top that had a dirty word monogrammed in velvet on the front.

  “And why are you wearing a shirt with that word on it?”

  “When I bought it, I thought it said slots.”

  Smitty and Georgina sat on the sofa behind me, silent, watching.

  “Do you know how bad you had me worried? How could you pull something like this? What were you thinking? You couldn’t leave a note?”

  “Do you want me to answer any of these questions?”

  “No! I thought you were kidnapped by Brody Brandt’s killer. Or lying dead in a ditch somewhere. And Amber. Oh! Don’t get me started about Amber. She’s on her way over here right now. She told you to come down to the police station today before eight. How could you blow her off like that?”

  “I didn’t feel like going.”

  “Well, you’re going now, missy. And there’s not a thing I can do to stop it. What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I saw a Barbra Streisand impersonator who was fabulous. You’d never guess it was a man.”

  I was speechless. After all I’d been through over the past few hours and this was the best answer she could come up with. Blue flashing lights peppered the front-room curtains. Thankfully, the sirens were silent.

  Georgina let Amber in while I glared menacingly at Aunt Ginny sitting in the armchair calmly petting Figaro. “Pleash come in, Offisher Fenton.”

  Amber was wearing plain clothes and her blond hair was hanging past her shoulders, out of her usual austere bun. “I’m officially off duty, but I told dispatch to call me when Mrs. Frankowski returned. I wanted to take her in personally.” Amber addressed Aunt Ginny directly. “I heard you had yourself a little excursion today.”

  Aunt Ginny shrugged. “I guess so.”

  Amber spoke in calm tones like she was addressing a jumper. “Didn’t I tell you to come down to the station by eight p.m.? It’s now after midnight. What’s your excuse for that?”

  “Caesars Palace had all-you-can-eat crab legs for $1.99.”

  Smitty and Georgina groaned from behind me.

  Amber shook her head and took a pair of handcuffs from her back pocket. “All right, Mrs. Frankowski. Let’s get this over with.”

  I was still furious, but I didn’t want to see Aunt Ginny led out like a common perp on TV. “Do you have to put those on her?”

  “She’s proven that she’s a flight risk. Come to the station first thing in the morning and I’ll let you know where we stand.”

  Amber led Aunt Ginny out the door and into the back of her waiting cruiser.

  Aunt Ginny’s eyes never left mine as they pulled away. My heart broke for the second time today.

  Chapter 41

  “How could you arrest her? When we were in the fifth grade, before you got too good for me, you came to my slumber party, and she stayed up with us all night telling us ghost stories and teaching us how to braid. That is the same woman you took out of my house last night in handcuffs. She may have used some bad judgment yesterday, but you know she didn’t kill anyone.”

  Amber tapped a pen on her desk. “She didn’t give me a choice. I gave her more latitude than I’m technically allowed. As far as the DA is concerned, if this eyewitness positively IDs her, they are ready to prosecute.”

  Another officer led a small, thin man out of the back room. He was well dressed in a slick purple suit with tightly tapered pants and a gray tie. The officer thanked the man and told him if they needed anything else they would contact him. The man was escorted to the door, then the officer came over to Amber and handed her a slip of paper.

  “I’ll be right back. Stay here.”

  Amber disappeared through the door to the back of the station with the other officer.

  Stay here? Right. I shot out of my seat and ran after the man who had just left the building.

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  He stopped and turned around. “Yes? I thought I was free to go.”

  I took him by the arm of his purple jacket and led him to the side of the building, away from the front door. “I just have one more question for you. You were the eyewitness that was brought in to identify the old lady accused of murder, right?”

  “I thought that was supposed to be confidential.”

  “It is. I’m the police stenographer, I was listening in over the intercom and my uh … recording machine broke down during the lineup.”

  “Really. I didn’t know it was being recorded.”

  “We do it all the time for our records. So the officers can refer to it later to make their case. Standard operating procedure. You know.”

  “If I had known I would have enunciated better.”

  “You were perfect.”

  He blushed. “Well, what do you need me to do? Do I need to come in again?”

  “No. I just need to go over your testimony with you to be sure I got it all right.” I pulled out a little steno pad from my purse and flipped to the page that had my grocery list. “Can you please repeat exactly what you saw the night of the murder?”

  “Like I said, it was about two a.m. I was out walking my bichon, Marmalade. She gets an upset tummy. Too much stress from living with Mother. We’re getting our own place soon.”

  Coffee, strawberries, coconut oil. “Okay, so far I have what you said.”

  “I was walking past Mr. Brandt’s house and I saw an old woman come out of his door holding a rolling pin covered in what I thought at the time was pie filling. FYI—not. Eww.”

  “What made you think it was an old woman?”

  “Because she was small and hunched over. And she shuffled when she walked, like she was used to a walker.” He hunched himself over and shuffled in a circle.

  “And what was she wearing?”

  “Don’t you have this written down?” He peered over the edge of my steno book.

  “Yes.” I held my notebook closer to my chest to keep him from seeing the words chocolate chips. “I need to hear it from you to confirm it.”

&n
bsp; “Okay, she was wearing a magenta track suit, the silky nylon kind from the nineties. And her hair was bright red. I noticed because someone with that color hair has no business wearing bright pink, you know what I mean?”

  I nodded. “How was her hair styled? Were you able to see it?”

  “A typical old lady ’do, done up like a swirl on her head. You know, B-52’s ‘Love Shack’ style.”

  “And what shade of red? Did it look like mine?”

  “No, it was much lighter with a touch of pink.” He held his hand to the side of his mouth and leaned in. “Somebody’s been to Vo-Tech.”

  “Did you ever see her face?”

  “Nope.”

  “By any chance, was she eating?”

  “How would I know? I just saw her shuffle out of the house and look around.”

  “Did you see which way she went after that?”

  “Sorry, no. Marmalade did her poo-poos and I was busy cleaning it up when the lady disappeared.”

  “Then where did you go?”

  He put his hand on his chest. “Marmalade and I went home.”

  “Which way do you live?”

  “I live down the street toward Decatur, two blocks from the beach.”

  Okay, that’s toward our house. “And when you took Marmalade home, you never saw the lady on the other side of the street or in front of you.”

  He took a step back. “Well, no. My gosh, you know, I didn’t.”

  “So she couldn’t have walked down the road toward your house?”

  “You’re right. She had to have gone toward the beach or I would have seen her.”

  I’m sure the ocean would make a perfect place to wash off a murder weapon. “Thank you.”

  “No, thank you. I’m so glad you asked me that. It’s amazing the things you can remember.” He gave himself a little hug. “Don’t forget to call me if you need anything else. Especially if the trial is going to be on TV and you want me and Marmalade to testify.”

  “We’ll let you know.”

  I watched him get in his orange Prius and pull out of the lot. He gave me a little finger wave as he drove off.

  So, either Amber’s star witness was a big fat liar itching to start a reality show career, or someone put on a vintage track suit and a wig to impersonate a certain little old lady and frame her for murder. That would rule out both Ken Freeman and Jonathan Lynch. Unless of course the impersonator was an accomplice to the killer. Hmm, that’s a thought.