Sleuthing Women

by Lois Winston

  I slipped on my uniform. Some people put locks on their lockers, but I operated on the assumption that people were about as interested in my ancient, stained sweats as I was in their clothing. I was fortunate enough to have a top locker and right now the only thing in it was a pair of sturdy, steel-toed, flour-encrusted shoes.

  I plopped my sweats and high tops in the locker. When I pulled out the work shoes, a paper fell to the tile. I opened the sheet of typing paper folded into fourths, and found letters cut from a newspaper. The form struck me as a comic anachronism, like a ransom note from a re-run of Perry Mason. The letters jumped around on the page like they must for a dyslexic. They said: STOP SNOOPING. IT WILL HURT PEOPLE YOU LIKE.

  I froze. The message was ominous. Until that moment, emotionally, I hadn’t believed the murderer walked among us. Now, it was no longer an intellectual exercise. What did it mean about my hurting people I liked? Was this a threat of more violence to come? Or was this the murderer letting me know that he—or she—was dear to me?

  Had someone just delivered it? Was that why the lights were on? I flung open the locker room door.

  As I stepped into the dimly lit hallway, the note’s message was driven home. A figure stepped from the EDR and clobbered me on the head.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The person who hit me needed a remedial thug course. The blow hurt and stunned me, but it didn’t even knock me down. I suppose it did the job, though. As I grabbed the side of my face, shook my head to clear it, and opened my mouth to scream, a door slammed and footsteps pounded along the loading dock.

  I wasn’t about to chase someone through folds of clouded night. Especially not in my stockinged feet.

  I opened and closed my mouth a few times to see if it worked. I had the impression I’d been struck with a flashlight, although the idea didn’t make sense. The attacker had been too far away. The person had apparently intended to hit me on the back of the head, but a squeak had alerted me and I’d turned into the weapon. The object caught me on the jaw, cheek, and upper lip. The lip throbbed. I ran my tongue along it, but didn’t taste any blood.

  Stuffing the note into my pocket, I walked shakily up the hall to the women’s room and inspected myself in the mirror over the sink. The lip was swelling and the skin under my cheekbone was tender to the touch. I’d probably have a bruise there. I peeled up the lip. The inside looked like an overripe plum. It would be a while before I kissed Chad.

  Indignation blotted out the pain. I could understand why someone would murder Fortier, but why would someone from the kitchen slug me? Neither of the blows to my head had been serious, but if my life continued this way, I could end up like Muhammad Ali.

  I crossed down the hall to the EDR, and for once in my adult life, wished my mom were around. Not so she could comfort me, but so she could educate my assailant.

  “You can’t beat any sense into her,” my mom would say, shaking her grayed head. “She’s too perverse. She’s been like that since the day she was born.” Her short, unpainted nails would pick at her knitting. “Why, she wouldn’t come out, even when Dr. Kremetz induced labor. Two days later, she changed her mind and didn’t even give us time to get into the delivery room....”

  I scooped slushy ice from the salad bar trough, wrapped it in a white terry towel, and pressed the compress to my lip. I returned to the locker room to put on my work clogs, which waited patiently for me on the bench as though nothing had happened.

  As I made my way up the hall and through the kitchen, I flicked on more lights. I managed to unlock the first refrigerator while still holding ice to my lip. I hated the nuisance of the padlock and wondered, as I entered the cold, how much good it had done in preventing theft. I had access to Eldon’s key. Buzz had a key. Buzz sent Victor to fetch stuff.

  The cluttered disarray of the Use-First shelf had invaded my space again. A half dozen new items surrounded the original offending half jar of olives. I had to set down my bucket of coconut macaroon dough and my ice pack to relock the door. I clumsily made my way back to the bakery. I hefted and banged the pail onto my table, wrung the wet towel into the dishwashers’ sink, and set the white terry ball on my stainless steel table for future use. Facing the entrance so no one could sneak up on me again, I scooped mounds onto a tray. They looked like heads and I fought the urge to smash them in revenge.

  I fantasized that I had pursued my attacker, tackled him, punched him in the face, hog-tied him with my kitchen smock and called the police.

  Gradually I calmed and thought logically. Who could I trust? Not anyone in the kitchen. The less I said, the better chance I’d have of staying a step ahead of the killer. I wanted the person to be unsure and nervous, to make a mistake. I would make him—or her—think I harbored other suspicions.

  In the stillness, through my noises and the hum of electric appliances, the door by the refrigerators clicked shut. My heart raced.

  I breathed deeply. My internal clock said others should be arriving. Still, I pulled my rolling pin from the wire racks. Hugging the hallway, I peeked into the kitchen.

  The person whistled I Saw Mama Kissing Santa Claus. I relaxed. Buzz.

  I stepped into the open as he rounded the corner by the refrigerator.

  He smiled and walked behind the back line toward me. He reached out his arms.

  I jumped back.

  “Carol?” he said, arching his pale eyebrows. “What’s wrong?”

  My mind and heart warred. My heart wanted to let him enfold me while I blurted the whole nasty affair into the warm turn of his neck. My mind said out loud, “What are you doing here so early?”

  Annoyance flashed in his blue eyes. “It’s not that early, Carol.” He dropped his hands melodramatically, as though I’d smacked them down. “What are you doing wielding a rolling pin and sporting a fat lip?” He mimicked my suspicious tone.

  “I’m rolling dough.”

  “You are not.” He heaved a big sigh that smelled like vanilla. “You’re making coconut macaroons.”

  “Then none of your business.”

  “If you say so.” He wheeled.

  “Well,” I said to his back, “you didn’t answer my question.”

  He looked back, the always accessible Buzz.

  “Why you’re here early?”

  “I’m here early because Ray hasn’t mastered lead line.” He waited, expecting tit for tat.

  “I tripped in the dark.”

  “And fell on your lip.” He nodded and strode across the kitchen.

  Buzz turned on his steamer. He whistled again but it sounded like a funeral march.

  ~*~

  I was beginning to relax when Victor leaped around the corner and asked, “Do you know why the pervert crossed the road?”

  He smiled in anticipation, combing his black hair with one hand. Then he squinted and stretched his bulky neck to get a better look at my face. His brown skin flushed and he touched his own lip involuntarily, asking the question with his fingers.

  “I fell,” I explained.

  The hand returned to his hair and I noticed the freshly skinned knuckle. The kind of injury a person might get from hitting someone. Maybe Victor wasn’t a clown; maybe he was one fine actor.

  “Why did the pervert cross the road?” I asked, amazed at the calmness of my voice.

  “He was still attached to the chicken.”

  He saw my eyes on his knuckles. “I hit something this morning,” he said.

  Not something, I thought angrily. Me.

  ~*~

  When Suzanne dropped by, she didn’t waste any time. She walked right up to me and said, “Oh my God, your lip.”

  “I fell.” It sounded lamer every time, like abusive mothers who claimed their maimed children fell. If I kept this up, someone might think I was covering for Chad.

  “You iced it?” She picked up the wet towel, and checked its cleanliness. Her face wrinkled in disapproval to find the bunched cloth empty of cubes. “I’m going to get you more ice.”


  She strutted off toward the outside icemaker and returned with a bulging, clicking bundle, which she thrust toward me.

  I obliged and held the cold pack to my lip. It felt good.

  “I was going to ask if you wanted to go for that beer today,” she said.

  “It’s only a fat lip,” I said. “When do you wanna go?”

  “How about when I get off?”

  “Fine. I’ll just hang out and have lunch here.”

  She peeked around the corner and then ducked back into my bakery.

  “What’s up?” I asked her.

  She sighed. “Abundio’s there now,” she whispered. “I don’t know why, but he suddenly seems to think I’m fascinated with him.”

  She saved me from trying to muster a response by dashing off.

  As I worked, I mulled over the case. Something about my snooping had upset the killer. Could it have been my visit to Victor’s house? Then why had he waited until today? It didn’t seem like my questions about the Kringling should worry anyone, even if Fortier had participated and Big Red or Patsy had drawn his name. It was about time I completed that chart, but it wouldn’t prove anything. Even if I established who might have given him the honey as a present, another person in the kitchen could have doctored it. Besides, why would anyone use a gift traceable to him or herself as a murder weapon? But then again, death row had no shortage of stupid people.

  I sighed. I needed more little grey cells.

  At lunch, I asked Alexis for Julieanne’s phone number in New Orleans. Let the killer think I was going back to my original, corny idea that the wife did it.

  Alexis was smashing peas for the pleasure of smashing. She barely met my eyes. I had the feeling she would never forgive me for seeing how vulnerable she was.

  “Oh, Julieanne decided to come back,” she said.

  TWENTY-NINE

  When Suzanne finished her shift, she and I returned to the sports bar where she, Patsy and I had been in the summer. The bartender remembered Suzanne. “Did you come back to watch that cooking show?” he kidded.

  Suzanne’s eyes widened. “That man, the Cruz’n Cuisine King, is dead.”

  “Oh.” The young man looked crestfallen, not at the news, but at his faux pas. “I owe you a drink,” he said to Suzanne.

  Suzanne shook her head. “I’m not getting a beer. I want something expensive. A brandy Alexander.”

  He took her no as a no, and I decided I liked him, even though he had no neck and didn’t know I existed. I’d absorbed enough of my mom’s Puritanical nature to consider hard liquor in the afternoon decadent. I ordered a Corona with lime.

  We waited for our drinks and then went to the table farthest from the counter. In order to forestall the subject of my lip, I launched into an account of Chad’s jealousy of Buzz, and how I’d grown unsure of Buzz’s intentions lately.

  “Don’t worry.” Suzanne patted my hand. “Buzz is too smart to be that stupid.” She pulled off her hair ribbon and slipped it around her wrist. “That didn’t sound right. I mean he knows you and Chad are tight.” She shot me her wide-eyed look. “Everything is okay with you guys, isn’t it? I mean I did notice that you didn’t bring Chad to the party.”

  “Oh yeah, we’re fine.” I didn’t sound convincing, but it didn’t matter. Suzanne looked distracted.

  “Speaking of tight,” she blushed and looked around, “I’ve been worried about Buzz,” she whispered.

  “Huh?” I leaned across the table. “Has he been hitting on you?” I tasted jealousy, like a rotten nut.

  “He might be blurring boundaries. He’s fallen off the wagon.”

  I sat stunned, letting the whispered words coalesce into meaning.

  Suzanne’s hands fluttered in frustration. “I don’t mean he’d have to be drunk to come on to you.” The nervous hands toyed with her drink glass. She hadn’t yet taken a sip. “God, nothing I’m saying is coming out right.”

  “I didn’t take any offense,” I assured her. “But why do you think Buzz is drinking?” I tried to sip my Corona, but my fat lip sucked into the opening. It stung. I broke down and poured my beer into the glass. “He has a MADD bumper sticker on his car, for Christ’s sake.”

  Suzanne bit her lip.

  “You think Buzz is so insincere? That he’d plaster a message on his car that he doesn’t mean?”

  Suzanne reached across the table and patted my hand. “I can tell you didn’t have any alcoholics in your family.”

  “Don’t condescend to me,” I snapped.

  Suzanne jerked away her hand.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. Apologizing was not my forte. The guy who gave me the name Sabala, hardly a dad by anyone’s standards, had been an alcoholic, but I had no memory of him, so it didn’t seem worth mentioning. “I guess you’ve had some experience?”

  “My dad. Believe me, sincerity doesn’t have anything to do with it.” She snapped her wrist with her scrunchie. “An alcoholic can look you in the eye and say that he won’t drink again, and the next day be falling down drunk. And you know what? He was sincere when he said it.”

  Even though Buzz had confessed his DUI to me, I realized that I had come to the conclusion that I wanted, that it had been a one-time lapse.

  Suzanne snapped her wrist to a stinging pink. “With an alcoholic, others are always to blame.” The punitive finger she’d used to snap herself wiped condensation from her glass like a windshield wiper. “Remember the Christmas party?”

  I nodded.

  “Buzz smelled like rum.”

  “Like eggnog,” I said.

  “Rum,” she insisted. “I saw him drinking the kitchen sherry, Carol.” She blushed.

  I felt ill. Granted that our kitchen used only the finest sherry, not cooking sherry, the action retained the desperate quality of Kitty Dukakis drinking fingernail polish remover. “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t say anything. I was too embarrassed.”

  “Does Buzz know that you saw him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I sighed and looked around the bar—dark wood, lots of beer and sports advertisements, and no ferns. Patsy, Suzanne, and my glib plotting of murder seemed a lifetime ago. At this time of day, the bar was cool and dim. A friend of the bartender sat at the counter and they argued amiably about the Buffalo Bills. Occasionally, the bartender let his gaze slip over to Suzanne.

  I thought of Buzz’s vanilla breath, and I realized why people use expressions like heartache and heavy heart. Sorrow swelled in my chest until it felt cramped.

  “What are we going to do?” Suzanne asked.

  I shook my head. “I dunno.”

  She let silence reign for a while and sipped her drink. “Should I change the subject?” she asked, recapturing some of the Suzanne lightness.

  I nodded.

  She reviewed the presents Eldon had given her as her Kris Kringle. Some of the things like the truffle and teddy bear had been within reason, but he’d also given her opal earrings and a cashmere sweater.

  I remembered Eldon in the mall the night of my own frenzied mission. While I’d never call Suzanne greedy or materialistic, she liked nice things that with our pay she couldn’t afford. “Sit back and reap the rewards,” I suggested.

  “But I feel guilty.”

  “Why should you feel guilty if a guy chooses to dote on you? Has Eldon asked you out?”

  “Good God, no!”

  “Then, what’s the problem?”

  “I feel like I’m leading him on.”

  “You’re just being gracious. How would he feel if you gave the presents back?”

  She snapped her slender wrist with the pale blue band again. “I know that would be humiliating. And if I embarrassed him like that, what would happen to my job?” She collapsed on to her arms, folded on the heavy, dark wood of the table, and rolled her eyes up at me. “Oh, God, Carol. What should I do?” She seemed about sixteen.

  I didn’t feel like a person to give advice. If a problem involved jus
t one’s self, I could decide on a course of action that felt right. But throw in another person, and problems became complicated. I did think Suzanne was over-reacting a little. “I told you. Relax and enjoy the bennies of having the boss wrapped around your pinky. For all you know, he doesn’t want anything but a Platonic relationship.”

  She straightened. “Now I know you’re not taking me seriously. When’s the last time you met a guy who gave you a hundred buck’s worth of stuff and only wanted to be friends?”

  “He could be different.”

  Suzanne yanked the band from her wrist and screwed her angel-food-cake face into an expression resembling a withering look. “Eldon is different.” She jerked up her hair until she looked like a troll doll and ensnared the curls in the blue band.

  She had me there. She sipped her brandy Alexander and licked froth from her pink lips. “Do you think this is sexual harassment?”

  “As sexy as your lips are, I don’t feel harassed when you lick them.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  I thought about her question. “I don’t know. You don’t like Eldon’s attention, but he gave you the gifts as part of a Kris Kringle. You don’t have any case if you haven’t let him know his gifts made you uncomfortable. And even then, he’d have to keep giving you stuff for it to be sexual harassment.”

  “Catch 22,” she said. “If I tell him, then he might fire me.”

  “If he does, you have a case.”

  “Who wants a case?” she moaned.

  We sat quietly for a while, trying to see a creative way out of the circle. “Well,” I said, “there is the possibility he’ll take rejection like a man.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  We laughed.

  “Did you know the police came back to Archibald’s yesterday?” Suzanne sensed what people did or did not want to discuss, and asked the question tentatively, testing the waters.

  “No, I didn’t.” I’d been so busy dodging queries about my lip, that I’d again lost track of the bigger picture. I tried my beer, but it tasted flat and warm in a glass. “What did they want?”